Finance teams rely on smooth collaboration and communication to build an accurate view of a company’s financial position. To keep up with fast-paced business, finance teams have to automate tedious work and stay connected with internal stakeholders, customers, vendors, and partners. Shortening the amount of time your team spends collecting, reconciling, and manipulating data will allow finance teams to be more proactive, accurate, and efficient.
After talking to many finance teams using Front, we found four workflows that unlock efficiency and allow these teams to shine:
Respond faster every time and keep communications organized
Collaborate with shared context
Integrate your most used systems with email
Track team performance with reporting and analytics
Let’s jump in.
1. Respond faster every time and keep communications organized
Finance teams can receive hundreds or thousands of emails daily, so emails can easily fall through the cracks. Using assignments and creating specific inboxes for special types of requests can help keep email overload under control.
Assign tasks to teammates for faster vendor setups
Imagine the sales team just signed up a new customer, and the next steps are to follow through with the vendor enrollment process so the team can bill for their services when done. In Front, you can assign tasks and messages to teammates with an internal-only @mention to keep them in the loop.
Handle customer payments faster
One of your customer’s auto-renewal payments is coming up, but they want to change the way their payments are submitted. This needs to be escalated quickly. In Front, you can create an Escalation inbox for situations like these. You can tag messages with “escalation” and it will immediately be sent to the appropriate inbox, creating team-wide visibility.
Once you hop into the escalation inbox, you can assign it to yourself or to a teammate to take care of.
2. Collaborate with shared context
Front allows finance teams to work together to deliver unmatched customer service. Features like comments, shared drafts, and team inboxes enable teammates to work together on messages, share context, and see clear ownership—so messages keep moving and never hit bottlenecks.
Imagine a teammate gets an urgent payment message from a customer but needs additional support or guidance to provide the right answer. At that point, the teammate can @mention another team member to add them to the message thread to create shared visibility and clear context.
Teams can also use comments to discuss internally on customer messages right in the email. If you want to keep the rest of your team or manager in the loop on a customer issue, add a comment to the customer email and mention the appropriate person on your team.
3. Integrate your most-used systems with email
Front offers an array of integrations that teams can access directly from their inboxes like Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot, and many more. Having a centralized system helps to reduce context switching and minimize errors.
For example, if your team uses a platform like Salesforce, you can access and collaborate with teammates inside Front, saving you time and becoming more efficient as a team by having everything in one place.
Front’s APIs allow your team to build the right workflow based on your team’s needs.
4. Track team performance with reporting and analytics
Analytics in Front helps teams improve operational efficiency with powerful insights into communication workflows.
As a manager, knowing why there are email surges or how to better staff for busy periods at quarter-end can help drive better decisions for your team. You can use analytics to see how many emails per day your team is receiving, average response times to customers, and individual productivity across your team. Front gives finance teams an inside look at how they are being successful and where they can improve for their partners and customers.
Take action with Front
Front is empowering finance teams to handle email overload, collaborate more easily, and gain operational control, so you can dedicate more time to strategic projects.
If you’re interested in learning more about how finance teams are using Front and to manage their shared inboxes, download our ebook, Shared Inbox Management.
Written by Jonny Parker
Originally Published: 14 September 2021