Topics: B2B Portal, Customer Experience, Invoicing & Payments
Launch a digital invoicing portal they said. It will be fun they said.
Oh, if only B2B invoicing portal adoption was as easy as creating the latest and greatest meme. But it’s not. It’s actually really hard.
Why?
Because it requires a deep understanding of what’s most valuable to your customers, a cross-functional team who’s committed to communicating and demonstrating that value, and a constant pulse (and if required, refresh) on what’s working and what’s not.
You know for a fact that you’re offering an experience that far exceeds the legacy tools that either you’re providing or your customers have created to fill the gap. But unfortunately, the ‘if you build it they will come’ mantra doesn’t take into account how long it will take them to come – and how much of an impact that sit and wait mentality will have on your invoicing portal ROI.
It’s easy to fall into the common adoption trap, using user counts and adoption rates to measure the success of your invoicing portal. But do those really give you insights into how the invoicing portal is impacting things that actually matter, such as customer retention, increased revenues and DSO?
Dissecting your invoicing portal adoption into the five key stages of adoption helps you to understand the process that customers go through to reach the final stage, and what should be your ultimate goal, of dependency.
Now, is there a magic number for how long it takes a customer to get to that stage? Nope. And will every customer who’s exposed to your invoicing portal reach that golden stage? Nope. But your adoption strategy should be aimed at moving every customer to that point – as quickly as possible.
And what about when customers get ‘stuck’ along the adoption path? It’s imperative to have the insight into why, for example, customers are inquiring but not registering (perhaps a daunting registration process?) or continuing to call on your billing team for custom reports instead of creating themselves (team continues to provide, so why not?).
The chart below outlines the five stages and recommended areas of measurement, specifically for invoicing portal adoption. Again, the goal here is to rethink the traction you’re making, focusing on usage and dependencies.
