When a customer receives an invoice and has a question about it, who does he call? The invoice usually only includes the company’s mailing address, and may only show a post office box where the corporate lock box is located. The person having a question must instead contact the purchasing department to obtain contact information. Even then, the purchasing staff usually only knows the names of their counterparts in the company’s sales department, so the inquiring person must go through the salesperson to finally locate the person who issued the invoice. This roundabout set of steps can be so frustrating that the customer just lets the invoice sit until the company’s collections staff calls to determine why it is overdue for payment. Thus, a lack of contact information can result in a great deal of customer frustration, possibly extending into non-payment.
The solution is to clearly state contact information on the invoice. This should be delineated by a box and possibly noted in bold or colored print. If the billing staff is large, it may not be practical to put a specific contact name on the invoice, but at least list a central contact phone number. If a company has chosen to assign specific customers to individuals in the collections department, it may be possible to list the name of the assigned collections person in the computer file of the customers for whom they are responsible, so the names of assigned people appear on invoices.
The main difficulty with this best practice is ensuring that the billing or collections staff returns customer phone calls. It is all too common for customers to leave messages in voice mail boxes that are never returned. This issue can be resolved by tying bonus pay to the speed of responses, setting up a daily procedure to review the voice message box, or sending out customer surveys.