Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to participate in an industry credit group meeting both in the United States and in Europe. In both cases, the importance of these meetings was clear given the challenging economic environment. While attendance is down at some these meetings because of the well publicized cuts or complete freezes in corporate travel, I was still impressed at the level of continued participation and attendance. It is refreshing to see that senior management is still supportive of these meetings.

Are you getting pressure to cut back on these meetings? Is upper management questioning the value, given budget cuts in other areas? Here are some tips and benefits to help you justify attendance.

Key Benefits of Participation in a Credit Group

Transfer knowledge, new strategies, tips and best practices

• With collections activities up significantly and disputes on the rise credit groups provide the perfect setting for sharing best practices and successful credit, collections and risk management techniques (both new and old)
• Outside experts can also provide unique insights and additional support that are often more expensive to obtain for a single company (many experts will participate at no cost to promote their company or credentials to potential customers in the group). In my case I was invited last week to run a workshop and presented on Collecting in an Economic Downturn
• Attendees often learn from their peers about the latest technology, information, and scoring products

Trade experiences

• Providing your company’s monthly trade experience information to your industry credit group (and all commercial credit bureaus) provides better transparency and has been shown to improve payment behavior
• Submitters often receive additional services such as credit scores, delinquency predictor scores or unique identifier information at no cost in return for providing their A/R experience
• In a live and confidential setting, sharing past facts on your experiences with customers provides unique commentary not found on a generic credit report
• Members benefit from the collective credit investigation capabilities of the entire group and their respective departments
• Benchmarking and industry trends, like those provided by Cortera, help members understand their performance versus their peers

Relationship building

• Long-term support of these groups builds invaluable relationships with your peers that helps protect the entire industry against fraud and frequent late payers
• Member sharing also helps build better information and technology solutions that are specific to the trade group

Member alerting

• The peer-driven, member alerting services provided by most credit groups are essential for communicating between meetings and ensuring the immediate flow of potential industry or customer risk. These services are only available to group members and cannot be purchased if you are not an active member
• Meeting hosts further expand this communication through delivering timely industry news, best-practices, and company-level insights to ensure regular knowledge transfer back to the credit group

Lowering Travel Costs

• Attend local regional meetings. These are often off-shoots of the national meetings and provide helpful member experience both locally and nationally
• Encourage members of the credit team to attend in their region and communicate to the national or global team
• Host meetings at your facilities to avoid hotel expenses
• Participate via conference call if you cannot attend in person

Have a tip or comment? Add it below to keep the sharing going.

Last week, many members of the Cortera team headed to Miami. No, we were not migrating south for the winter (tempting as it may be when the mercury is once again falling below 40 in New England). Even better, we hosted our annual Cortera Global Customer Conference. The event is an opportunity for our clients to come together from around the world to network, train, and learn from industry experts and each other.

As I reflect somewhat on the annual conference over the years, it is easy to get lost in the logistical details of organizing a wide array of training classes, keynotes, interactive sessions and networking events.

However one thing always shines through and that’s the community itself. This year was no exception. With a tough economy, write-offs and bankruptcy on the rise the group was as united as ever. Having just completed our sixth conference I wanted to step back and look at our goals when we first set out to create an annual global customer gathering:

1. Enable the community to provide unified product direction and consensus;
2. Facilitate the community of customers, partners, industry experts and employees to network and interact to form long-lasting business relationships;
3. Provide an environment dedicated to learning and peer sharing.

Six years ago the annual event started in modest form with product and company update presentations and a few round table sessions spread over a day and a half. In contrast, this past conference evolved into over 30 sessions with six unique tracks, featuring experts and customers often sharing the same stage and in-depth breakouts taking sharing to the next level. What is amazing to me is the genuine enthusiasm and ownership that our customers have shown toward this event.

What is also apparent is how this community and the credit and collections profession has evolved over this time. Here are a few of my observations from the conference. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts below.

• Companies are leveraging new techniques, strategies and information to speed the collections process and improve cash flow. It was clear that in many cases through better models they were able to head off issues ahead of time as customer payment patterns deteriorated.
• Companies are increasingly looking at their entire organization holistically across product lines and geographic boundaries. Credit professionals are now at the forefront of owning customer exposure globally and linking business through various information sources. The concept of Master Data Management (MDM) has emerged as a catch phrase as organization struggle to gain a single source of the “the truth” when it comes to customer information that is often spread across many technology platforms.
• The changing economic climate continues to move the credit function into a more strategic role in the front office as write-offs and customer bankruptcies challenge the entire organization, not just the credit department. Businesses with strong balance sheets are now consulting with the credit leadership to use this crisis to potentially take market share as weaker competitors are forced to tighten credit line standards.
• Similarly as the economy pushes closer to an official recession, business fraud is on the rise and the credit function is on the front line of protecting the business. Throughout the conference this theme was consistent in many circles.
• Businesses are employing a more sophisticated approach to analyzing customers through multiple information sources and complex scoring models, much like financial institutions have leveraged for consumers over the last several decades.

These are just a sampling of what I heard through the many round tables and breakouts; feel free to voice your own comments on the conference.

It has been a busy few weeks as we wind down our annual spring user groups that started off in London back in February and finished in Louisville yesterday. Every year I come out of these meetings more inspired and encouraged than the previous year. Over the last several years I’ve had the privilege to watch as our customer community evolved from small subset of early-adopters to a vibrant and highly diverse group covering a wide range of company types and industries. The community is passionate and intensely involved in driving product direction and even influencing corporate strategy. Even more inspiring are the relationships that have developed between not only employees and customers but between the customers themselves. Words like “vendor” and “client” have been replaced by “partner” and “friend”.

So you might ask – how did you build such a strong and vibrant community? It is pretty simple. We partnered with our users to create a forum dedicated to listening. The user groups started small with only a few users in a few cities, but the message was clear for us – better listening equates to better products. Today we are in nearly constant contact with customers from the spring user groups to the fall global conference and many less formal discussions in between. I was sitting at dinner with a customer last night and he was complaining about another vendor (this is always fun when it’s not you!), because his sales rep came in and was attempting to tell him how to run his business and manage his policies. However, this person had never actually performed this function or worked in his industry. In a similar manner, building technology or information products is very much the same – you can’t build great products without involvement of great customers who live their profession and unique industry every day.

Of course it is easy to conduct these meetings and tell users that you are listening, but what happens after is equally important and takes companywide commitment. I often get asked, “What happens to all our feedback and ideas after this meeting? Where does it go? How does it get prioritized?” The answer is pretty straightforward. We compile it and look for trends across the user base. All feedback channels point to a central location and get prioritized, in most cases, by intensity of interest and customer business impact. The major ideas and new feature enhancements are prototyped and re-circulated back to the user community for vetting and further discussion. By the time a major feature makes it to market a majority of the community is well aware of the functionality and has had their individual chance to influence the newest release.

In summary for those reading this that are new to Cortera and our products and interested in our community philosophy or those simply looking to create your own user community for your respective products, here are a few tips:

• Listen: A user group is a meeting or a multi-day meeting dedicated to listening. Not pitching or selling. The customer has already purchased the product, now is the time for learning from both the vendor and the user. It is very easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest product features, but without listening you miss the simple enhancements and features that can have a huge impact on the customer user experience. Every meeting I come away with list of what I would call simple enhancements that can easily be rolled into the next release. Over time these “simple” enhancements add up to an enormous amount of goodwill. The best ideas come from the people who use the product day in and day out.

• Gain companywide commitment: It does cost money and time to start a user group community, so it is essential to have top down support. That said, sending only a customer service representative or even a product manager is not enough. We’ve had success because of the involvement across the board from developers, senior management, sales, marketing and professional services. The entire organization needs to hear from the customer. When it comes to our annual global conference we involve nearly department to ensure maximum exposure and interaction with our customers.

• Facilitate the feedback loop: This seems like a simple concept, but you’d be surprised how often we get the question, “Now that I am a customer, how do I get my enhancements and my ideas to the right people?” For us, it has been by asking each customer. Again it sounds simple, but without asking, a customer may be too polite or timid to speak up to tell you. So we ask, and ask often. From professional services and support team calls to user group meetings, we are constantly asking “what else?”, “what do you like?”, “what bugs you the most?” Of course once you have the feedback flowing, you need to ensure that you communicate when these new features and enhancements suggested by the community are included in the product. For us, we close the loop in a variety of ways: our regional user group meetings, webinars conducted by our product management team, release notes, our customer portal, professional services engagements and our annual global conference that is packed with training sessions. There is no such thing as over communicating.

• Be humble: Simply put, the product is never perfect and never done. Accepting criticism and being flexible (and nimble enough) to change shows your commitment to the customer. A defensive stance in a user group or community meeting will undermine the entire community effort. With each new product we develop our customers are actively solicited for feedback and product direction.

• Support your customer evangelists or heros: Every company has “go-to” customers that know your product probably better than you do in some cases. The sooner your embrace this group and empower them the better. This can take time, but get them involved in speaking opportunities, customer training sessions, expert panels and even public relations activities. Often times the benefit for your company is just as strong as the benefit for the customer in terms of career accolades and industry recognition.

• Community is 24/7/365: Provide a mechanism for customers to reach other customers. Whether this is an online community or simply sending contact spreadsheets out, the goal is the same – year round communication. Last fall I watched as two customers in Europe that had met only once at our European Regional User Group in London exchanged emails. I was cc’d in the exchange, but one customer had a question and went right to another for advice. In a matter of minutes several emails were exchanged, and expert advice was passed on from the best source, an actual user.

When all of these tips are working in sync you’ll know because references will occur without your involvement, prospects will approach the sales organization after you’ve been recommended by a peer and the most impactful enhancements will rise to the top of the list.

Let us know what you think.