Customer Chasing

Customer Chasing allows you to automate sending account-level collection notices and statements. With Customer Chasing your customer only receives a single notice encompassing their entire account balance. It can be used in combination with Invoice Chasing to provide account-level and invoice-level coverage.

How It Works

With Customer Chasing, you can set up your cadences once and then enroll customers in the appropriate cadence. A cadence contains the steps or collection actions you plan to take when customers have an open balance. Cadences describe how and when to follow up with your customers. Each communication can be personalized to the account to maximize its effectiveness.

A cadence consists of a series of steps to be taken according to the account's age (the number of days since the oldest outstanding invoice date) or past due age (the number of days since the oldest outstanding invoice due date). If at any point the customer pays their balance in full, the cadence will reset.

Here is an example cadence:

Example Chasing Cadence



According to the example above, a customer with a newly issued invoice would receive a letter and an email from Invoiced. As the account ages, the other actions would take place automatically. Most actions are completely automated, except phone calls and escalations. These steps will assign a task to a team member.

Supported Channels

Customer Chasing is omnichannel. You can send collection notices to customers through the following communication channels:

• Sending an email
• Mailing a physical letter
• Sending a text message
• Calling the customer
• Escalating the account internally

Timing

One nifty aspect of chasing is that you get to choose when cadences run. For example, you could choose to execute any scheduled activities at 7am every day. Or maybe you want to restrict this to specific days of the week or month. Chasing gives you the fine-grained control to make sure you are reaching your customers at optimal times.

Each cadence has its own timing settings that run at the time that you have specified. Any times given are based on your company time zone in Settings → Business Profile.

Balance and Age Mechanics

Chasing attempts to collect the customer's entire account balance, with some exclusions noted below. This means that if a customer has multiple invoices outstanding they are only receiving a single communication at a time from the system about their outstanding balance.

The customer account balance figure includes:

• All outstanding invoices that do not have AutoPay enabled or a payment plan attached
• All currently due installments (if on a payment plan)

The customer account age is the oldest open invoice or installment. The past due age is the oldest invoice or installment due date. If no due dates were used within a customer account then any steps based on past due age will never execute.

Setup

This document describes the latest version, Smart Chasing. If you are using the legacy chasing feature then you can find the docs here.

Building cadences

The first step to using chasing is to setup a cadence. You can build as many cadences as you'd like and assign them to customers based on how you would like them to be followed up.

1. Go to Settings → Chasing in the Invoiced application. Click New Cadence.
2. In the first step you will give your cadence an easily identifiable name, configure when chasing activities should occur, and optionally set a threshold if you do not want smaller balances to be chased (i.e. < $100).
3. The second step is the most important part. This is where you build the schedule of chasing activities. Each step represents a single action that will happen. You specify the account age or past due age when that step should run. Depending on the action selected there will be different settings. For example, in the email step you can select which email template to use.
4. In the final step you can have chasing cadences automatically assigned to customers based on certain conditions, like payment terms or customer language. If you do not setup any assignment rules then the cadence must be assigned to customers.
5. Once you are ready click the Save button to create the cadence. You can come back and edit the cadence any time, however, once assigned to customers you cannot change the schedule.

Contact Roles

Invoiced has a feature known as Contact Roles that allows you to assign a role to customer contacts. The contact roles list is configured by your business and you can name the roles as anything that has a meaning to your business. For example, you might create different roles for Accounts Payable, Executives, Sales Representatives, or Customer Success Managers. A role might be for a contact outside of your organization, or even used by a person within your organization.

Here's how you can use contact roles:

1. You can create different contact roles in Settings → Chasing → Contact Roles.
2. Once you have created contact roles you can then assign them to contacts. By default, contacts are not assigned any role.
3. You can also have invoice or customer chasing steps apply only to customers with the matching contact role.

Usage

Enrolling customers

Now that you have one or more cadences, you can start assigning them to customers.

You can assign cadences individually in the Collections tab on the customer page by clicking Enable Chasing:

You can also bulk assign cadences to customers by using our spreadsheet importer. You'll find instructions here. 

Monitoring chasing progress

You can see chasing progress across your entire customer list at a glance.

If you want to see the specifics of an individual account then you can go to the Collections tab of that customer's account.

Chasing Activities

Below we describe each of the chasing actions supported, including emails, letters, text messages, phone calls, and escalations.

Send an email

The email action allows you to send an email to customers. The email will have a "Pay Now" button directing the customer to the customer portal. You can optionally have all of the outstanding invoices attached to the email as a single PDF attachment.

These variables are available for use in your email templates:

• {{customer_name}}
• {{customer_contact_name}}
• {{customer_number}}
• {{customer_address}}
• {{customer_payment_terms}}
• {{account_balance}}
• {{invoice_numbers}}
• {{invoice_dates}}
• {{invoice_due_dates}}
• {{{customer_portal_button}}}

Send a letter

The letter action will mail an Open Item statement to your customer via our Lob integration. In order to use this feature you must have a Lob account connected.

Send a text message

The text message action will send a text message to the customer's text-message enabled phone number on file (must be added as a contact to the customer). In order to use this feature you must have a Twilio account connected.

Phone calls

The phone call action will add an item to your to do list. You or another team member will be responsible for making the call. Our system makes it easy to keep track of any collection calls and record notes.

Escalations

An escalation will flag an account for review. This can go on the team-wide to do list, or can escalate an account to a specific person and get added to their to do list.

Chasing Installments

The chasing behavior changes slightly when an invoice has a payment plan. When the invoice is created, the account age refers to the invoice issue date, as usual. After each installment is paid, the account age uses the previous installment date instead. This allows you to create reminders for customers prior to their installment date. 

In the following scenario, the customer would receive chasing step 1 on June 9th, 10 days after their May 30th payment date. 





Cadence



If the customer misses their June 30th installment, they will receive the past due reminder as usual, on July 2nd. 

The chasing cadence will reset when the balance is paid in full. If an installment becomes past due, the next installment amount is included in the customer’s balance. If they pay the past due amount and the next installment, chasing will reset. 

In this scenario, if the customer pays the past due amount only, and their next installment is due on July 30th, they will not receive the chasing step 1 email on July 10th. Chasing will reset after they make their July 30th payment on time.

Limits