Aircall

Air-tight payments

Aircall is a cloud-based phone system for businesses. It integrates with all major CRMs, such as Salesforce, HubSpot and Intercom, to help sales and customer support departments drive growth and customer satisfaction through the power of conversation.

“The beauty of Aircall is that it’s quick and easy to set up,” said Paul Mondollot, VP of Financial Planning & Analysis. “Today we have around 20,000 customers in almost 100 countries.”

To make sure its seamless customer experience doesn’t come undone at the point of payment, Aircall lets customers pay their way, whether by credit card, bank transfer or ACH pull. But there’s a clear favourite at Aircall, explained Paul: “We prefer ACH because it's a ‘pull’ method that we can control, and it doesn’t come with heavy costs like credit cards do. Even better, it's the only one that’s fully automated.”

And the reason ACH pull is such good value and completely automated? Because Aircall uses GoCardless.

Hassle-free automation

“Our old system required us to integrate and maintain every single payment scheme and their mandates ourselves,” said Paul. “We wanted to grow Direct Debit adoption because it’s more cost effective than cards. But that was difficult to do because we also need our people working on solutions to customer challenges, not building payment solutions.”

Instead, GoCardless now takes care of the hassle of connecting with the various payment schemes used by Aircall throughout the world, and a simple API integration with its ERP system automates billing, collection, and reconciliation.

Growing internationally

“Increasing GoCardless adoption internationally, particularly in the US, is strategically important for us,” said Keaton Bolt, Accounts Receivable and Cash Collection Manager.

"Customers also really appreciate the extra visibility that comes with the automated notifications around when payments are due,” added Keaton.

GoCardless is also more reliable because of the stability of bank account payments compared to cards.

“There are a lot of ways card payments can fail, which disrupts revenue and causes friction in the customer experience” said Keaton. “GoCardless pretty much takes payment failures out of the equation, because bank accounts don’t expire, they can’t be lost and customers almost never change them.”

Less effort, more cash

“We love GoCardless because it requires zero effort from our side,” said Keaton. “The moment an invoice is created, the payment instruction is sent to GoCardless for collection, then automatically reconciled in our systems. On top of that, it is the most affordable option.”

Marcelo Costa, Accounts Receivable Accountant, Aircall explained the impact of this automation on both his day-to-day job and cashflow for the business.

“GoCardless makes my job a lot easier – it saves about a day and a half of work a month,” he said. “And for every customer that pays by GoCardless, our days sales outstanding is about 7 to 10 days versus about 30 days for bank transfer payments.”

Nearly 100% payment success rate

Aircall uses Success+ from GoCardless to automatically retry failed payments and spare the team from having to chase customers themselves. This feature uses GoCardless’ payment intelligence data to reattempt collections when they’re most likely to succeed.

“We had to build a credit-card retry mechanism ourselves, from scratch, so it felt like a lifesaver to discover GoCardless had taken care of that for Direct Debit,” said Paul.

In fact, since Aircall started using it, GoCardless Success+ has retrieved a huge number of failed payments without any manual intervention. “Over the lifetime that we’ve been using GoCardless, we’ve retrieved over €200,000 with Success+” said Keaton.

Room to grow

Aircall benefits from having the support of a GoCardless Customer Success Manager just a phone call away. This has been a regular source of help and inspiration.

“Having a Customer Success Manager means any issue or question is quickly solved, usually within 24 hours of opening a ticket, and they help to maximise all of the solution’s features,” said Marcelo. “This kind of support gives us such confidence, and combined with the success we’ve had overall means we really want GoCardless to handle all of our payments in the future. There’s certainly plenty of room to grow from the 20% we’re at today.”

More to come

Paul is thinking even bigger than that: “We've passed €100 million annual recurring revenue and are now looking ahead to €1 billion. GoCardless will be a key partner when it comes to efficiently scaling up to that level.”

And the opportunity to work more with GoCardless is something he’s personally looking forward to.