BizWisdom

Less time chasing payments means more time wowing customers for BizWisdom

Melbourne’s BizWisdom, a digital marketing agency, is relentlessly focused on driving tangible business outcomes for its customers in the shape of growth through inspired digital thinking.

According to Sam McEwim, the company’s Founder and Director, anything that diverts the energy of his small but expanding team from that singular purpose is worse than a distraction. It’s a risk to growth. And chief among these unwelcome diversions is issuing invoices and chasing and reconciling payments – an issue that is only getting bigger as the business becomes more successful.

“The time spent chasing invoices and late payers is crippling and it is only becoming more time consuming,” he said. “For an agency dedicated to delivering great customer service, emails and calls chasing payments is the absolute opposite of what we want to be doing.”

Looking for a way to ensure payments didn’t get in the way of providing great customer experiences, Sam turned to GoCardless to better automate key processes and make related finance functions more seamless.

A great promise and a no-brainer

By relaunching its payments process with GoCardless at its core, BizWisdom has saved itself valuable time chasing invoices and reconciling payments while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience.

“The opportunity to get customers to sign up once to GoCardless and not have to worry about it ever again was a great promise and a no-brainer,” said Sam. “We were spending days chasing unpaid invoices – a needless activity that adds no value – but that’s been all but eliminated by GoCardless.”

Now, roughly two-thirds of customers pay via GoCardless, which has relieved the team of a huge administrative burden. But, as Sam notes, the company’s success in onboarding so many customers to such a significant process change naturally required some customer education.

“We probably have a 70% success rate with getting customers onto GoCardless,” he said. “There is sometimes an understandable reluctance to sign up for Direct Debit, particularly at the start of a new relationship. But we’ve found that the personal touch of sending the first invoice directly from our own email helps overcome most hesitations."

GoCardless and Xero: simply beautiful

As a Xero customer, BizWisdom leverages the native integration between the two platforms to further guarantee process efficiency and a seamless customer-facing experience.

“The integration with Xero is beautiful,” said Sam. “Customers simply click the link we send, sign up to pay with GoCardless and the rest is taken care of – invoices get issued, paid and reconciled. It's a dream.”

Leveraging well-integrated technology from major brands such as GoCardless and Xero also adds to the slick overall experience that BizWisdom strives to create. “Onboarding clients is a crucial phase of the relationship for a marketing agency and early impressions matter a great deal,” said Sam. “The tools you use represent you and they need to highlight the professionalism and attention to detail that customers can expect. And GoCardless plays a small but essential role in creating a positive perception.”

Great payments help keep a great team together

Sam believes he can trace the benefits of GoCardless beyond his original aims of saving his team and clients the pain of processing, chasing and paying invoices. The team has more time to provide a great service and he believes it’s almost impossible to overstate how important that has been to the long-term health of the company.

“GoCardless integrates wonderfully with our business because it just frees us to do what we're good at, which is providing a wonderful level of service,” said Sam. “That drives growth, which provides job opportunities for the team, allowing us to keep a great team together and to keep them excited.”

Reflecting further on the new payments process and its overall impact on the business, Sam says that the silence since implementing GoCardless speaks volumes about its success.

“Compared to all the calls and emails chasing payments in the past, the success of implementing GoCardless is not measured in feedback – it’s measured in the absence of feedback,” said Sam. “It works well and when payments are working well, they get out of the way. And that's why I love GoCardless, it does what it does exceptionally well and then it lets us get on with more productive things."