Credit Management September 2023

“Incorporating AI into the collections process will provide
businesses with greater visibility of incoming cash and better
forecasts, which allows them to adjust their strategies accordingly.”
– Martyn Brooke
if a customer has received a derogatory report from a monitoring service that
you may have with your CRA or if their payment behaviour has deteriorated.
You can then use this information to set appropriate credit limits.”
In today’s data-saturated world, credit teams are shifting aways from
Excel spreadsheets, in favour of the advanced capabilities of AI, which is
significantly more efficient at collecting and computing data to assess risk:
“AI is a far superior system compared to manually computing data using
Excel spreadsheets. It can simply work in the background once plugged in,
giving you the freedom to focus on more strategic tasks. However, you will
need to exercise your own judgement in approving the payment terms, risk
categories, and other suggestions offered by the AI. You will always have
the final say.” Likewise, AI can also facilitate decisions within the customer
payments process by automatically matching invoices to payments and
suggesting allocations where there isn’t a match: “AI has the ability to
compute many data sources that inform its recommended allocation.
A human will always approve the recommendation and have the final
decision.”
Simpler communications
With the development of technologies such as Natural Language Processing
and ChatGPT, Martyn believes that AI can now also help credit managers
with communicative tasks. With the intelligence to understand text and
spoken words, and interpret tone, these technologies are capable of drafting
standard communications that would help credit teams answer customer
enquiries quicker: “AI technologies are now being employed to answer a
range of customer requests and they are advanced enough to compose
the type of reply that it thinks you want to send,” Martyn explains. “It can
recognise the tone and sentiment of a message and can extract and retrieve
data to generate a recommended answer. You can then choose to send, edit,
or delete the reply.”
The AI can also recognise keywords that enable it to reply with the
appropriate action that the credit controller or collector will take in
response to the customer request: “the AI can respond to requests for
copy invoices, draft promise to pay messages and a range of other queries
within seconds by picking out salient keywords within the message. And
if the actions that it suggests are wrong, then the credit controller or
collector can easily sort that out.”
Accelerated processing
Finally, Martyn showed how AI can speed up the O2C cycle by accelerating
the speed at which documents are processed: “We can now use AI to
classify emails into orders, remittances, claims and subsequently extract
the relevant order data, remittance data, and claims data.
“Another significant benefit of AI is its e-mail triage capabilities. Most
companies will have a shared customer service mailbox that becomes
overwhelmed with emails. AI now has the ability to read and recognise the
documents that are coming in, especially from regular customers, and it
can learn what it needs to do with each type of document.”
Martyn brought the webinar to a conclusion by recalling a few of the many
success stories from Esker’s customers. Rather than limiting or threatening
human intelligence, it is becoming a source of empowerment to credit
teams: “From my experience, businesses are accruing many benefits from
integrating AI into their O2C cycle – job satisfaction has gone up, attrition
has gone down, and credit teams are able to deliver a better customer
experience.”
To find out more about Esker’s RPA and AI solutions, please visit: https://
www.esker.co.uk/cloud-business-solutions/order-to-cash/
Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / September 2023 / PAGE 43