Communication is cheaper and easier than ever these days, with every imaginable way to communicate at our finger tips. So why is it often harder to actually reach people?

Credit Today's Best Practice Series recently highlighted the critical importance of making it easy for your customers to reach you. Any time a customer tries to reach you - for whatever reason - it ought to be of the highest priority to make that an easy and welcoming experience.

Whether they have money or not, want to call with a problem or a compliment, the lines of communication should be as open as possible.

A delay of payment will occur if a customer:

• Cannot reach the person who handles their account.
• Are left on hold for any extended amount of time.
• Leave a voicemail message and do not get a timely call back.
• Are unable to navigate your menu options or find an option that relates to their need.
• Are hung up on or cut off.
• Cannot reach a live person when they need to.

The inability to contact the right party in your organization is certain to translate into a loss of customer satisfaction and stretched out DSO. The key is to provide easy access to your credit department for their account and billing questions, and then delivering the resources so that your customers are quickly served.

At Credit Today, our recommendation is to have a single point of contact for after-the-sale customer service issues to make it easy for customers to reach your credit department when they have billing or credit-related issues. By being easy to reach and by empowering those on the front lines with the ability to resolve customer questions when they first contact you, you eliminate "drag" from the process of converting receivables to cash and also promote customer satisfaction.

The principle is to do things right the first time.

Many organizations demonstrate by their actions that they don't believe they have the time for that, but then have to make the time to address the same mistakes over and over again.

The fewer the hand-offs and staff involved in a customer issue, the more efficiently it can be resolved. Doing things right the first time implies an efficient use of human and technology resources.

But more importantly, perhaps, it implies that you care about your customers.

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·  The Best Practice Series: Installment 5 -Optimizing the Risk/Reward Equation and Increasing Efficiency with Credit Scoring ·  The Best Practice Series: Installment 3: Base New Customer Credit Application Processing on Distribution Channels and Anticipated Exposure ·  The Best Practice Series, Part 2: Provide Customers with Easy Access to your Credit Department and Information About Their Accounts ·  The Best Practice Series for Accounts Receivable, Credit And Collections ·  Being Accessible ·  What Salespeople Do-And Don't Do-With Credit Information ·  Six Bunker Busting Tips for Improving Internal Communications ·  Five Ways to Get People to Care About A/R Data