Improving invoice collection through intelligent dispute resolution

Industry Sector: Logistics & Transportation

Business Function: Accounting

Invoice dispute resolution is an issue in most corporations. A mismatch between the delivered service and customer expectations, data errors in the invoicing process and a lack of transparency around the individual line items are a few of many potential reasons for disputes. Foundry enables customer service, collections and finance departments to provide invoice dispute resolution specialists with the necessary data to quickly resolve disputes and ensure that more cash is collected as quickly as possible, ultimately improving the cash flow of the business and decreasing the volume of dispute alerts.

Challenge

A global logistics company receives thousands of invoice-related inquires from customers every day. To understand the terms that govern the inquiry in question, customer service representatives had to traverse more than 10 systems and manually compare contracts, timetables, and more. With no simple way to determine the validity of an inquiry, representatives often resorted to discounting invoices to preserve customer satisfaction. Even still, this manual and time-consuming process led to customer frustration and was a drag on revenue.

Solution

Palantir Foundry was used to devise the following solutions:

• Intelligent inquiry routing: Customer service representatives have a complete view of all inquiries with integrated data from 10+ systems. Machine indexing automatically routes incoming inquiries to the correct department. Human reviewers then audit customer service actions to continuously improve the indexing model.
• Inquiry context and analytics: Automated logic helps representatives identify the cause of an inquiry so they can give customers a clear explanation for the invoice. To help navigate the discussion, representatives are provided with historical context about the inquiry, such as previous emails and invoices.
• Approval workflows: Customer service representatives diagnose the issue and record the outcome of the inquiry. Together, these inputs automatically initiate approval and correction workflows across the organization.

Users and stakeholders

Customer Service, Collections Department, Finance

Impact

• A global logistics company increased annual collections by over $50M.
• The volume of invoice-related inquiries decreased by approximately 10%.
• Expansion to additional use cases building on invoice dispute resolution.

Time to Value

Highly dependent on the customer's data landscape. Implementation can be anywhere between 1 to 6 months.

How it's made

Systems integrated in the specific implementation were: SAP, Salesforce, custom contract system, booking system, various custom CRM systems, legacy equipment system.

Workshop Application: A dispute resolution specialist quickly has access to all incoming disputes and is presented with the necessary data to triage the dispute, ask for more information or resolve it. Necessary data includes information about the service/booking, the individual invoice line items, customer information, contract rates, information customer payment terms and booking/service history that details all changes to the given booking/service.

Ontology & Writeback: The resolution can then be written back to the case management system, which in this case was Salesforce, and expected payment dates can also be adjusted for accounting purposes in Foundry, which are then written back to the ERP system (SAP).

Implement a similar use case

This use case implements the following Pattern. Follow the link below to read more about a particular Pattern and learn how it is implemented within Foundry.

• Operational process coordination (used for 8 other use cases)

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