Head of billing…corporate hero or corporate zero?

If you’re the Head of Billing, you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. And with that weight, comes the opportunity to transform your company’s billing and revenue operations into a world-class organization…or keep it mired in status quo processes that are 10+ years old.

How you perform in this mission-critical, highly scrutinized role will either raise you up to corporate hero…or drop you down to corporate zero.

Once viewed as a more tactical role, the Head of Billing now encompasses both day to day operations and a strategic, visionary role. Your constant pulse on the company’s billing operations gives you a unique view into the company’s performance, customer engagement and the inner workings and supporting technologies of the organization.

And with this visibility, comes expectations.

While process improvements have always been a major part of the billing role, recently, the focus on improvements has been elevated to a more strategic level. Instead of tying improvements specifically to billing, i.e. improving cycle times and consolidating systems, your role is now responsible for improving the most valuable asset of your company – the customer experience.

Due to its influence, billing – and your role – sit at the intersection of the customer experience. You’re not only tasked with defining the billing process and resulting invoicing experience but also guiding a slew of other facets (see image below).

You have a unique opportunity to provide a world-class customer experience – in an area where others are falling short. And it all starts with establishing the invoicing experience as the primary POSITIVE touch-point between you and your customers. And then leveraging this trusted channel to serve as the foundation for delivering important marketing, sales and support information.

It’s about transforming the invoicing process into an experience that is welcomed, and even appreciated, by your customers. It’s implementing an invoicing portal strategy that enables convergent views of customers and products, accelerates time-to-market for new service launches, supports architectural scalability – all while reducing the total cost of ownership in the process.

Gone are the days of hiding behind paper invoices and convoluted systems. Customers could care less how many systems you have fused together in the back-office. They want it to work for them on the front – with smart, actionable, responsive, personalized interfaces – and this is falling to you.

The integration and infusion of consolidated and customer-centric invoicing, automated reports and payments, dynamic self-service, and a litany of emerging value-added communications are the enablers of this transformation.

Question is – are you at the helm on the way to becoming a corporate hero? Or watching from the sidelines at risk of becoming a corporate zero?