As a general premise for working in credit and collections management, we need to have customer information in a simplified or summarized way, and easily accessible.
While so far in D3FO we had the ‘Customer Credits and Collections’ workspace, which I love because it is super intuitive and the information is presented in an organized and easy to identify way, when contacting a customer or making a collection call we had to navigate through several pages or perform some searches to obtain the details or their history.
The «COLLECTIONS COORDINATOR» workspace has been specially created to help collections agents manage customer accounts more efficiently (with a greater emphasis on delinquent ones):
🌿 Reducing the time and effort spent manually reviewing transaction details.
🌿 Improving collections efficiency by providing relevant information and useful tools in one place.
🌿 Facilitating customer communication by generating personalized reminder emails.
In this first section, I want you to get ready to get the most out of it when it is enabled. So let’s see everything we need to get started (configurations and prior information). And then we’ll get into how to use it.
🌱 ENABLE FEATURES
First we need to enable the features, the workspace consists of two pages:
🌿 Collections coordinator workspace
🌿 Collections coordinator summary
To obtain the AI-generated summary from Microsoft Azure OpenAI in the ‘Collections Coordinator Summary’, you must make the configurations detailed in the Microsoft Doc:
🌱 PRIOR SETTINGS
I won’t go into much detail here because it’s not the purpose of this blog, but I do want to make sure you check that you have the following settings made, and that they match the organization’s operations:
🌿Aging period definitions
🌿Customer pools
🌿 Collections team and agents
🌿 Customer aging snapshots
Just in case, the Doc of Ms:
🌱 CUSTOMER FORM
In order to be able to contact the customer’s responsible parties in an accessible way, we need to have the information available in the system.
To do this, we will need to have configured the customer contacts. From the Customer >> Accounts >> Contacts >> Add contacts section available on the action pane, and then assign them from the card.
🌿 Collections contact
🌿 Sales demographics: email of the primary contact
🌿 Other contacts:
In this section, the system simply assign the first contact created in the customer.
🌿Contact information:
Information of the Global address book.
🌿Employee responsible:
We´re going to assign an employee (from our organization, not the customer’s) to identify who is the main responsible for this customer.
🌿Credit and collections: credit rating and credit limit
This refers to the customer’s credit information, in particular the credit rating and credit limit.
IMPORTANT! : All contact information that will be displayed in the workspace must have the ‘Primary’ checkbox enabled, otherwise it will not be seen from the details of the ‘Collections Coordinator Summary’ page.
🌱 SUMMARY: TEXT AND EMAIL
Thanks to Azure OpenAI technology, we can obtain a summary of customer information and send an email to the collections contact. How do they work?
🌿 Financial data analysis: The Azure OpenAI language model analyzes the customer’s financial data, such as outstanding balances, overdue invoices, payment history for the past year, the amount of outstanding debt, and customers incomes. All calculations are performed in D365 Finance.
🌿Text generation: Based on the analysis of the financial data, Azure OpenAI generates a concise and clear summary of the customer’s collection situation.
We can generate an email directly from the page. Azure OpenAI incorporates robust filters and safeguards to help prevent offensive, destructive, or abusive content from being created by using this feature.
However, it is very important to keep in mind that the email is generated using artificial intelligence data and D365 Finance, and the content is a suggestion. As Microsoft tells us, it is your responsibility to review and edit the suggested content to ensure that it is complete, accurate, and appropriate before sending the email.
Especially for those of us who work with many cultures, please always review before sending.
🌱 DETAIL OF THE INFORMATION
Where does each section of information come from?
🌿Summary
🌱 VIDEO
And I´m leaving you the video of the workspace, in a first part it is in Spanish and in the second in English 😊