The Challenge
For over 90 years, Carter Machinery has been focused on creating the highest level of success for their customers and team members. They sell and support the full line of Caterpillar equipment, engines, and electric power generation systems.
This Cat dealership has been delighting customers by allowing them to view and pay their invoices online. Allowing customers to make payment using their preferred payment method meant dealing with increasing credit card acceptance costs and wanting for better control of their overall payment acceptance costs.
They had previously set up surcharging in their Billtrust customer portal, only recovering 2%. However, this resulted in internal acceptance inconsistencies with some collectors waiving the surcharge outside of policy.
The Solution
With digital invoicing and payments solutions in place, Carter Machinery strategized with Billtrust to drive a larger amount of payments through their online solution while improving their ability manage payment acceptance cost and maintaining customer payment preferences.
Carter started by partnering with Billtrust’s eSolutions team to drive adoption of electronic invoicing and payment with their customers, to inform them of payment options available to them, and to update them on the increase in the surcharging rate. Various campaigns were launched during the year to engage with customers on the benefits of electronic invoicing, payment options and costs.
Further, Billtrust worked with Carter to enhance their surcharge configuration that allowed for improved waiver consistency and application.
“We wanted to implement credit card processing fees and surcharging, but we wanted to find the right balance between the cost of card acceptance and customer satisfaction. With support from Billtrust, we’ve increased touchless payments and balanced surcharging with other intelligent payment options. As a result, most of our customers are using a standard payment process, and we’ve had no negative feedback.”
Trey Shartzer
Credit Manager
Carter Machinery
The Results
The combined efforts of Carter and Billtrust have provided Carter significant financial benefits while maintaining customer payment options.
Carter has increased its electronic invoicing engagement to 76% of all invoices. Touchless payment on those invoices increased 28%, the result of better customer engagement with the Carter’s invoice and payment solution. Further, effective communication of payment options and related costs resulted in Carter’s customers’ increasing ACH payments by 36%, to 82% of total payments. Some customers continued to pay via their card preference despite the surcharge increase, resulting in total card payments decreasing 57%.
The Billtrust partnership has allowed Carter Machinery to increase their policy compliance and preserve customer payment choice without needing to sacrifice margin to cover card acceptance costs, in addition to reducing their paper processing fees.
| Invoice Rate and Payments | Before eSolutions Campaign | After eSolutions Campaign |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Invoice Rate | 73% | 76% |
| Touchless Payments* | 65% | 84% |
*Payments initiated by customers through the Carter portal
