The Situation: A well-established West Coast answering service with a four-decade history of steady growth and success did many things well, but they wanted to do even better. And this was despite the fact that they were already among the industry’s leaders. The Opportunity: One area they identified as something they could do even better at related to the efficacy of their billing and collections process. Instead of seeking to augment their existing department with more staff, additional training, or a complete departmental overhaul, they instead opted to seek outside assistance from billing and collection experts Call Center Sales Pro. The Solution: Call Center Sales Pro set to work. Their first step was to assume responsibility for invoice generation. By interfacing to their client’s answering service platform, Call Center Sales Pro downloaded relevant billing data and generated accurate bills according to their client’s instructions and rate specifications. After sending out the bills, Call Center Sales Pro embarked on an optimization strategy. The first step focused on receiving payments faster with less collection efforts. Then the attention shifted to offering new, revenue-producing services to existing customers. The numbers are significant. The Results: For the last three quarters of their fiscal year, the client realized the following outcomes:
| • | The amount of auto payments (handled monthly via credit card or check by phone) increased a half of million dollars from the prior year, marking a 270 percent increase. |
| • | Hospitals and governmental accounts, which are historically slow payers, often take forty-five days or more to remit funds. They were encouraged to move from check payments to ACH (Automated Clearing House) and EFT (electronic funds transfer) reimbursement methods. In the last three quarters of the fiscal year, $385,000 dollars were received via these two means, representing much faster collections and far fewer of these large accounts becoming past due. This provided the client with over a third of a million dollars of their money sooner and with less effort. |
| • | HIPAA-compliant messaging was offered to doctors and healthcare personnel as they migrated from pagers to smart phones, as well as those who once relied on unsecure text messaging. This resulted in over $17,000 in new revenue. |
| • | Handling ever-changing on-call information is a thankless, time-consuming task for answering services. Plus they often preform this service without compensation, since they lack a means to effectively track this work. To address this, Call Center Sales Pro implemented a proven on-call service strategy that took away much of the headache and generated an additional $140,000 of new revenue in the process. |
In summary, faster, more efficient collections resulted from the work of Call Center Sales Pro’s expert billing service team, slashing the average number of DPO (days payable outstanding). In addition, they realized untapped revenue potential and generated an additional $157,000 in new revenue from existing customers. The Bonus: Because this client also took advantage of Call Center Sales Pro’s premier answering service sales and marketing service, they were able to add over $20,000 a month to their base rate billing. This resulted in an annualized growth of $260,000, which represents over a quarter of a million dollar boost in annual billing. And this increase is independent from all of the work of their billing optimization and the new revenue that effort generated. Janet Livingston is the president of Call Center Sales Pro, a premier sales and marketing service provider for the call center industry, which helps clients improve the effectiveness of their communications and grow their business. Contact Janet at contactus@callcenter-salespro.com or 800-901-7706. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer from Southwest Michigan.