How Customer Service Elevates Supply Chain Finance Program Success
By • Published October 7, 2022 • 5 minute read
What makes a global supply chain finance program successful? Obvious answers include being able to support multiple languages, currencies and jurisdictions, supplier participation, and having the right tools in place. Less obvious – but every bit as important – is customer service.
Customer service in our business is a multi-tiered endeavor. We serve both buyers and suppliers, and how well they are “serviced” has a definitive impact on the success of the programs they participate in. At every juncture – from program design to supplier training and onboarding – there is opportunity to maximize program effectiveness while strengthening the relationship between buyer and supplier. It’s our job to make sure those opportunities aren’t overlooked and help our customers and suppliers realize the full potential of their program participation. Here are a few examples of what this looks like through a customer service lens:
Aligning Internal Resources for Program Support
We go beyond helping buyers determine program goals and objectives. We help them align finance/treasury, procurement and IT stakeholders around the program’s purpose and success. This goes a long way in ensuring the program has internal and executive support and is viewed and measured as a strategic initiative.
Supporting Supplier Outreach to Drive Maximum Participation
Not only do we work with buyers to prioritize which suppliers to target for participation, we train them on how to message the value of supply chain finance in a way that encourages broader participation. We work together to create and execute supplier outreach programs early on in the onboarding processes. This includes creating a scalable toolkit of templates, brochures, videos and websites that buyers can use to educate a large, diverse community of suppliers.
Ensuring Supplier Onboarding is Easy
Of all the phases of supply chain finance program design and implementation, supplier onboarding is perhaps the most critical. Ensuring the supplier’s comfort level with the customer’s supply chain finance platform is key to a successful program deployment. We understand this as well as the need for flexible training options. Large, strategic suppliers may require individual orientation sessions with hands-on training. Smaller suppliers often do better with group training sessions, on-demand videos or webcasts.
In all circumstances, we help suppliers understand how they can derive the most value from supply chain finance using our platform. For example, for a supplier with seasonal business, highlighting the ability to create rules that automatically flag invoices for trading based on seasonal volumes and cash flow requirements.
Letting the Numbers Tell the Story
In the world of finance, the numbers tell the story. Our “numbers” are a testament to the level of service we provide to every buyer and supplier we engage with. One benchmark is our Net Promoter Score, which measures user satisfaction. We score a 47 for buyer-led programs and 67 for supplier-led programs. Respectively, that’s over 2x and 3x compared to the industry average, which is in the 20s. Additionally, on the buyer-led supply chain finance side, on average, 75% of invoices uploaded to our platform are traded for early payment.
Today, PrimeRevenue accelerates payments on over 10 million invoices per year, enabling suppliers to be paid on average 95 days early and providing buyers with an average increase in cash flow of more than $90M. The PrimeRevenue platform facilitates more than $25B of assets under management on a day-to-day basis.
Our buyers and suppliers also tell the story, which is this – in a world where companies have many options for unlocking liquidity, PrimeRevenue’s solutions and people are a cut above the rest.
