By: Sandy Cryderman, director of revenue accounting and process improvement
Wonderful things have been happening on the project horizon. Merely six months have passed since we started focusing efforts to automate our payment process. Now we’d like to share some of the statistics that show the progress that has been achieved on this front. Lots of thought, planning and work went into setting up the new centralized lock boxes and online bill pay. Yearning to put an end to old manual processes and improve efficiency and effectiveness for all parties involved is the underlying intent to this entire initiative.
We started this process by converting our legacy Petro-Card 24 lockbox to feed into E1. The only effect this had on the field was that the mailing address changed for our customers. The majority of our customers have updated their account numbers and addresses, but we still have a few stragglers we may need help converting. We will close the old lockbox in the next few months, so getting these last few customers converted is essential.
Phase 2 of this progression was opening a new lockbox for all BP/LP customers. This was to help automate the payment process further, gain consistency across the company and to free up time in the field for our CSRs and/or managers. We can see major progress on this project. Since implementation in July, approximately 18% of our payments are going through this new process.
The next step in the project was online bill pay. Over the past few years, we have had a lot of requests for this function. Since implementation, many customers have started utilizing this option. Although the number of customers using online bill pay is not as overwhelming as those using the lockbox, it gives us a foundation to build on and provides options for our customers. Since the existing option does not currently offer statement viewing online, we will be reevaluating this application for an upgrade in the future.
The graph below shows usage percentages for each of our available payment methods. As you can see, nearly half of all our payments are now going through an automated process!
In December, we started rolling out the payment application within E1. The first few plants have already begun this transition and we will continue to introduce this feature to new plants through a phased approach. Soon, the majority of the manual payments received will be entered directly into E1.
The first employees trained to enter payments through E1 outside of the Home Office were Chris Threlkeld and Sarah Fuehring, two of our new senior CSRs. They are enthusiastic about introducing the new payment application process.
“I’m excited for our CSRs to get started with the new payment application,” says Threlkeld. “Speed receipts are definitely user-friendly and should improve our payment entry speed. I think everyone will find it to be a big improvement.”
“Once the CSRs have been trained, they will find it to be easier to process payments more quickly,” says Fuehring. “It isn’t hard to learn and even if you make a mistake, they are easy to fix. I also like that we will be able to post our Petro-Card 24 payments, eliminating the need to send those in separately.”
The final item we have on our list to help automate payments is to convert our customers’ online banking payments to the ACH rails. Today, if a customer initiates payment through their bank’s online banking, the bank sends a check out to the plant. Once this project is completed, those transactions will come directly into Home Office in an ACH file, much in the same manner as the lockboxes and online bill pay.
These projects have all been in an effort to make everyone’s lives easier and give a variety of payment avenues to our customers. A lot of time and effort has gone into implementing these various options; we sincerely hope that our field personnel are feeling a benefit from this work and that you are encouraging our customers to utilize these new payment options. And, as always, we welcome your feedback.