Over the course of this year’s Summit, we were fortunate to have some very compelling and insightful keynote presentations from leaders in their respective areas. In this installment of our Summit blog series, we’ll share the themes and takeaways from these presentations.
Billtrust CEO and founder, Flint Lane, kicked off the event by setting the backdrop with a recap of the year behind us and a look into the year ahead. With companies racing to become digital businesses today, organizations are under an enormous amount of pressure to undergo their own digital transformation. Going digital creates new efficiencies and advantages for every part of a business, and the order-to-cash process is no exception. Not surprisingly, however, for many businesses, a digital transformation can be challenging. As Flint noted during his presentation, Billtrust is committed to helping our customers navigate this process from beginning to end.
Going digital has many benefits for an organization, including automating processes, enhancing company cash flow through new efficiencies, reducing strains on teams and enhancing a company’s overall customer experience (CX). Customer experience was a key focus for this year’s Summit. And one that TJ Keitt, Principal Analyst at Forrester, dug into during his keynote. TJ set the stage by showcasing the tremendous growth that CX leaders like Amazon, Salesforce, Netflix and others have experienced. As he explained, CX is how customers perceive their interactions with a company, and ultimately gauge their opinions of that company. To put it simply, when CX goes up, customer loyalty goes up. Think about the companies that you interact with the most — what do they all have in common? A stellar customer experience.
As these leading companies continue to find ways to provide easier, more efficient and transparent experiences, we as consumers are being conditioned to expect, or rather, demand these things from any company that we do business with. While these expectations may have been born out of the B2C world, they have also transitioned to B2B. With greater expectations though, come greater challenges. According to McKinsey, 65% of B2B customers don’t think their experiences with other businesses match their experiences with consumer companies. Just because we go to work, doesn’t mean we forget our expectations as consumers. With 73% of Millennials now involved in B2B purchasing today, the need for B2B businesses to match the CX that their B2C counterparts are providing is greater than ever.
This holds true in the world of payments as well. As Kevin Phalen, Senior Vice President Head of Visa Business Solutions, said during his keynote, the way that businesses pay and get paid today is far from optimized. This isn’t news, though. B2B payments has been a laggard, as B2C and P2P have experienced an enormous amount of innovation that has resulted in payments being sent between users with an incredible amount of speed and efficiency. Thankfully, we’ve recently begun to see FinTech companies addressing the B2B space with a similar vigor that they have addressed the B2C space. Massive amounts of investments are being made to help companies keep up with consumer expectations in commercial and enterprise payments through digitization. This was exactly the focus of our partnership with Visa on Billtrust Payments Network (BPN). We saw an opportunity to transform B2B payments by increasing automation, reducing costs, and streamlining the reconciliation of payments for B2B suppliers and we are taking full advantage of it! We will dig more into that next week.
This extends well beyond BPN into our entire 2019 product roadmap. As Derek Bluestone, EVP of Product Development at Billtrust, said during his keynote, the themes for this roadmap are Elevate, Efficiency, Customer Experience. Our announcements of Billtrust Collections and the acquisition of Second Phase directly illustrate these themes and our commitment to designing products centered around creating excellent customer experiences.
For us, this commitment starts in house. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to consistently rank highly in NPS and customer retention, but were never completely satisfied. We are making significant infrastructure investments, enhancing our support and configuration capabilities, and adopting CX best practices so that the experiences that our customers have are as exceptional as the ones their customers have when they interact with our products.
One of the final highlights of Summit 2019 was the chance to hear from professional poker player, Annie Duke. Annie has risen to the top of the poker world through her background in psychology and her ability to make excellent decisions. After all, that’s what poker is — a game of decisions. The process of decision making is an art in an of itself, and as a company, the decisions we make dictate our success or failure. As an organization, we’ve decided to focus on the customer, and we’re confident that that’s a decision that will pay off.
Thanks again for joining us for this installment of our Summit 2019 blog series. Make sure to tune in next week for a deeper dive into the world of BPN! See you then.