Customer Story
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN DEDUCTION CLAIMS PROCESSING WITH AI-DRIVEN SOLUTION
- 500HOURS OF CSR TIME SAVED
- 50%OF PROMOTIONAL INVOICES PROCESSED IN LESS THAN 1 MINUTE
- INCREASEDVISIBILITY ON CLAIMS RESULTING IN MORE ACCURATE ACCOUNTING
- ENHANCEDINTER-DEPARTMENTAL COMMUNICATIONS & WORKFLOWS
- IMPROVEDCATEGORISATION OF ORDER DELIVERY PRIORITIES
GBfoods, a Spanish multinational food processing company, with well-known brands such as Gallina Blanca, is used in over 70% of Spanish households. Following the successful implementation of Esker’s Order Management solution automating all orders received by email and fax, GBfoods then decided to extend the relationship to include the deduction claims processing, which includes supporting documents such as trade and promotional invoices. These documents were creating multiple complications within the company’s order-to-cash (O2C) cycle: The customer service (CS) department was spending 30-40% of their time manually processing them, and the accounting team had little to no visibility into how much would be deducted from Accounts Receivable invoices, rendering the entire accounting inaccurate.
CHALLENGES: CREATING AN EFFICIENT & STREAMLINED DEDUCTION CLAIMS PROCESS
Managing deduction claims is an integral part of GBfoods’ interactions with distributors and retailers. The reasons for claims are varied: incidents occurring during merchandise transportation, delivery or reception, erroneous invoicing, or order placement due to formatting discrepancies. Most often, however, claims were placed due to promotional agreement divergences such as volume discounts, promotional offers at the point of sale, etc. Managing these was a tedious and time-consuming task for GBfoods’ CS department, despite being essential to ensuring correct accounting and payment allocation. The process also often involved other departments, such as sales, who validated invoices to ensure that they corresponded to the original customer agreements and did not include unauthorised deductions.
SOLUTION: DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING THE DEDUCTION CLAIMS PROCESS
In order to provide excellent customer service, GBfoods’ customer service representatives (CSRs) are involved at different stages of the O2C cycle: managing orders, claims and other steps in the sales process, such as trade invoices sent by retailers. “In total, we receive more than 7,000 documents to process, 80% of which come from the retail sales channel,” said Susana López, Front-Office Retail Customer Service Manager at GBfoods. The company was aware of the need to digitally transform its deduction claims process, simplify the work of the CS and AR departments and reduce overall processing times. GBfoods implemented Esker’s Claims & Deductions solution to automate the reception, sorting and processing of deduction claims: The CS back-office team now receives, automates and separates the supporting trade and promotional invoices to be debited or credited in order to carry out an initial classification. Based on the VAT, the AI-supported solution then determines whether the invoices are related to a discount, a service or another category and then, once validated by the Front-Office Retail Customer Service Manager, a cost centre is assigned. If there is a doubt, the invoice is sent to sales or another department via a collaborative investigation and approval workflows.
Esker reads the headers and billing lines, thereby automating a low-value task. This allows us to spend more time processing trade and promotional invoices by applying customer agreements. Our CS department has saved over 500 hours per year, freeing up the representatives to focus on higher value tasks.
RESULTS: SAVING TIME & IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Meeting the intended objectives of streamlining their processes and improving efficiency, the entire CS department has received plenty of praise from other departments, as inter-departmental collaboration is now much easier and faster.
BENEFITS
- 500 hours of CSR time saved thanks to automated deduction claims processing
- 50% of promotional invoices processed in less than 1 minute
- Increased visibility on claims resulting in more accurate accounting
- Enhanced inter-departmental communications & workflows
- Improved categorisation of order delivery priorities
We’ve improved the whole O2C process and enhanced our collaboration with customers. This has resulted in a very a low dispute rate at GBfoods and an order delivery service satisfaction level of over 98% for more than five years.
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