Ask Aria Billie Today’s enterprises rely heavily on CRM platforms to manage customer accounts, create personalized experiences, deliver enhanced care and support, and drive informed business decisions. In fact, CRM systems are often considered the nerve center of the organization.
As CRM platforms pull and consolidate data from across various functions, even the most advanced and feature-rich systems are only as effective as the breadth and quality of the data they ingest. While detailed customer identity data remains at the core of most CRMs, the availability of rich, real-time, and accurate billing data has become an equally essential ingredient for generating the coveted unified view of the customer every organization craves.
Why is billing data so critical?
Within enterprise customer care circles across all industries and geographies, billing and invoice-related topics, questions, and complaints account for as much as 60% of all inbound inquiries. How these inquiries are handled can make or break the customer relationship.
With direct access to real-time billing data, customer care agents – human or otherwise – can quickly and efficiently field, address, and resolve inquiries, while also unearthing upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Sales and marketing teams can also leverage billing data to design tailored and customized offers that improve customer experiences.
The marriage of CRM and billing data
CRM providers are increasingly recognizing the critical role billing data plays in enabling enterprises to manage customers and provide exceptional support quickly and accurately. As a result, some have engaged in partnerships with billing providers to bring billing data into their platforms.
Through its partnership with Aria, for example, ServiceNow surfaces real-time billing data from Aria Billing Cloud so that users can seamlessly view customer usage activity and billing history to quickly identify the root cause of issues and propose resolutions. Customer service representatives have all the information they need at their fingertips within the CRM environment, eliminating the need to swivel between systems.
Powering AI adoption in customer care
Even with access to critical billing data, customer support today is still mostly reactive in nature. However, that is destined to change thanks to AI, with billing data set to play an outsized role.
Any company would like to know as much as they can about their customers’ happiness and satisfaction with the product or service they are consuming at any given moment in time. No source of business intelligence is as reliable at delivering this understanding and unified view of the customer as billing data, which often incorporates detailed usage data.
Billing data reveals how often a customer uses the service, their usage trends, and how often they engage customer care to complain or change their plan. AI applications can monitor, analyze, and surface insights contained within billing data and deliver a real-time picture of customer sentiment to the enterprise.
Armed with this intelligence, enterprises can flag changes in behaviors and take necessary actions, such as alerting the customer to a forthcoming price increase, or an unusually high bill, and offering an alternative service plan to pre-empt bill shock. Proactive engagements, made possible by real-time billing data, transform what would have been negative and relationship-threatening moments into positive experiences that deepen loyalty and unlock new revenue opportunities.
As AI automation advances and ambient agents take on more customer care tasks, billing data will also play a significant role in empowering agentic AI agents to identify and resolve issues without human intervention and, in many cases, before the customer is even aware that an issue exists. With access to billing data, agentic AI agents can spring into action at the first sign of an anomaly and salvage a situation that might have prompted a customer to churn or seek assisted care.
Billing data is indispensable in the AI era
Billing data has always been important, but in the AI era, it will become indispensable. Enterprises that integrate their billing platform with their CRM will deliver faster resolutions, more personalized service, and more proactive account management as AI adoption in customer care and self-care accelerates.
To learn more about how Aria and ServiceNow are leveraging the power of billing data to advance CRM and enhance proactive customer care in the AI age, watch this on-demand webinar hosted by Aria’s Chief Innovation Officer, Brendan O’Brien.
