GoCardless has enabled Grain Broadband to automate billing and reconciliation processes, saving two days a month on admin and delivering an exceptional customer experience.
of failed payments successfully recollected with Success+.
Better cash flow, happier customers
Grain delivers fast, reliable broadband to hundreds of thousands of UK homes, providing each one with its own dedicated fibre line. With a Trustpilot rating of 4.8 today, the company prides itself on offering an excellent customer experience.
However, that wasn’t reflected in their old payment processes, which were clunky, manual and a drag on cashflow.
“Our Direct Debit mandates weren’t automated, which created a huge amount of manual work,” said Iwona Olender, Customer Service and Billing Manager at Grain.
“We had to manually generate and upload a billing spreadsheet at the end of each month, which took one person two or three days to manage. And we had to wait up to 45 days for some payments because we could only collect on the 14th of the month.”
From two days of admin, to two clicks
Grain initially wanted to overhaul its payments so that it could collect payments on the day invoices fell due, at any point in the month.
Together, GoCardless and Grain have made that happen, and more. Because it’s integrated with its Zoho CRM and Zapier workflow automation tool, it’s also allowed Grain to completely digitise its onboarding and wider payment processes.
“Customers can now sign digital mandates in minutes and get connected the same day,” said Iwona. “Previously, this process took much longer and often caused delays. On our end, we can just click two buttons, and the system creates all the subscriptions for us automatically. That means we can schedule their install sooner too.”
This comprehensive digitisation has saved days of admin while reducing the risk of errors.
“With minimal data entry required, the likelihood of mistakes is much lower,” said Iwona. “Instead of spending two or three days manually processing payments and reconciling them across our systems, we now run simple checks to ensure the automation is working smoothly — a task that takes just minutes”
Taking the pain out of failed payments
GoCardless has also made failed payments much easier to identify and resolve, further boosting cashflow.
With our oldsystem, it would take us so long to figure out why a payment failed that another invoice would become due, which would also fail because we hadn’t yet fixed the original issue.
“Now with GoCardless, our failure rates are super low – just 2.1% – and the Success+ feature automatically retries any failed payment. 70% are successfully collected the second time around," said Iwona.
Some customers’ payments fail because they’re having financial trouble. When that happens, Grain uses Instant Bank Pay to help them to spread the cost of their bills and keep them connected.
Broadband is an essential service, so the last thing we want to do is cause struggling customers even more hardship by cutting them off. With Instant Bank Pay, we can send an instant payment link to anyone in arrears as part of their promise to pay agreement. It’s super flexible, making it easy to take partial payments, and managing Direct Debit and one-off payments in a single platform keeps reconciliations simple.
Ready for the future
Iwona sees GoCardless supporting Grain’s growth well into the future.
“We’re scaling up so fast,” she said. “The automation with GoCardless means we could add tens of thousands more customers without needing any more agents in billing. I feel confident about GoCardless: I’ve never had to worry about it not working.”
