Introducing Zuora Collections for Finance Teams

Good afternoon. Nice to meet you all. Thank you for everybody who’s attending today. My name is Chad Conley. Uh, I’m MRVP of go-to-market for our collections product here at Zuora, which is, uh, a newer product we have, we’ve launched. It’s focused specifically on, uh, the role of collections teams and collections agents within the platform. Um, today we’re gonna give you a little bit more detail on, on what that is and why it’s important to you, um, and your teams, and show you a little bit of the functionality behind it so folks can get educated on it and determine if they wanna learn more about it. So, um, before we get going, just a couple quick things on housekeeping. First, as you’re joining, please say hello. Let us know where you’re from, where you’re joining from. You can do that in the chat tab within

Goldcast. Um, as well, if you’re looking in that, around that chat tab area, you can actually see a docs tab as well. On that docs tab, you can actually download some of the curated content we have relative to collections, so if you wanna share that with other people in your company, uh, come back and review it later, whatever you need to do, please do feel free to download that and use it to your heart’s content. Um, the intent is to share it with you and we want you to take that with you. Uh, third, please, we’re gonna ask some questions and, and, and, and some polls, right? Use the Q&A tab. Ask questions as appropriate. I’ll try and save time at the end. We have some ground to cover today, so I’ll try and save some time at the end for, for Q&A. And then we’ll actually ask you probably two poll questions as we go through, one at the beginning, one at the end.

Uh, we’d love to get your participation in, in that so we can get some color as to what are the most important things for you. Um, if you at any time find that you are really, um, interested in this and you want to, to get a, a deeper level of detail, there is a talk to experts button, uh, talk to experts button at the top of the screen that you can use. Click on that and that will generate, uh, us, uh, the ability to follow up directly with you and we would, we can reach out and talk to you in detail about your questions and any of the interests that you have. And then last, we are recording this session. Um, this session will be available one to two hours after by using the same link. So if you come back to this and you wanna re-review it later, you can actually just even go and open up your old invite, calendar invite, pull up the same link,

and watch the recording as you see fit. So thank you so much for attending. We’re really excited to talk to you about this today. Um, before I jump in, last piece of business, I forgot about this, uh, the forward-looking statement. I’m not gonna sit here and read this to you. Please take a second to review it. Um, this is something that we stay standard relative to everything that we present here and to a public fashion. All right. Moving on. Um, we’re actually gonna ask our first poll of the day. Um, so the first question we’re gonna put out there is gonna be around, uh, the struggles and areas of interest that you

have relative to collections as a whole. So if you could take a quick second to answer that, we would be most thankful. Give about another minute or so for folks to take part in that poll. Good time to use the space for the forward-looking statement just sitting up here on the screen so nicely with a bunch of words. Thank you for, uh, for doing that. It look, it’s looking like, um,

got sort of an early tie of data fragmentation and partial or no visibility into full customer view being areas of, of struggle or pain, as well as inability to forecast collections with detail and precision is another area. Also seeing some fo- some focus on, uh, scaling the team while controlling costs is, is another area of importance as well. So thank you, thank you for taking the time to participate in the poll. We appreciate it. For us, the way that we’re trying to do is, is understand really what, what you folks are, you’re experiencing, and so as we tailor our product as we move into the future, as we tailor our presentations and, and unders- you know, we just wanna be as close to understanding what the true pain and needs are, you know, from our prospects and customer base as a whole. So thank you for the intel. We really appreciate that. Uh,

and we’ll get started here. So first, sort of the backdrop for collections, right? If you’ve, uh… I’ll kind of talk about this in two ways. One, if you’re new to Zuora, one of the things that we’ve noticed in the industry is, is that there’s been a lot of uncertainty in, in the financial markets, uh, of lately. You can, you can go back as far as almost 2021 relative to that, and, um, you look at all the things around, you know, global macro and macroeconomic events or whatever, and, and the way that a lot of companies are, we’re seeing a lot of companies, um, take action to, to counter that, um, inconsistency or, or that, that level of, um, uh, uncertainty is to actually keep cash on hand. And cash right now is becoming more and more important to global CFOs

as they see it e- enables them to, you know, have, uh, res- you know, to have, to be resolved as a company, right? To have the ability to weather the storm of ups and downs from a financial perspective when you have cash to help float that time. You can also make strategic investments, uh, for M&A and other things relative to that. And so what we’re seeing overall is that cash is becoming actually the biggest focus right now in the times of uncertainty in the market. And one of the things we noticed with Zuora was that, like, hey, listen. We, we’ve, we’ve done a, you know, our, our background is, is pretty heavy in obviously known as subscription management and consumption and, um, in, in terms of like subscription management billing, contracts, you know, revenue recognition. We do payments and whatnot…. one area that we really hadn’t focused on to, to really,

um, get better and improve was in this, you know, collections team, collections agent type of focus to where we could really bring more of that cash piece or the cash to focus, right? We wanted to do that based on what we were hearing from our customer base and what we were seeing in market. But what we realized is that in recurring revenue business, the goal of collections is, it’s a little bit different, right? It, you know, the traditional model, the o- old world model is sort of, you know, at any given point, you’ve got an outstanding invoice, right? That invoice is associated with a customer and you’re, you’re kind of like getting 80 cents on the dollar, right? You’re, you’re chasing your money to some extent when you’re in collections anyways and you’re, you’ve got a target, whether it’s 80 cents or not, you know, using that sort of a Pareto rule. But the idea is that you’re

only going to be able to collect so much of that. But when you start thinking about it in terms of keeping up a customer relationship over time, that becomes predominant from a recurring revenue model, for example, right? Or even a longer-based, longer-term based contract that takes place over years, really it’s about understanding everything about that customer during that timeframe so you have a very tight relationship with them. So it’s not just about necessarily, like, you know, one invoice and trying to track that down because what happens, then I’m going to have to reach out for the next invoice or the next invoice, the next invoice or, you know, it’s really about managing the customer relationship and focusing on maximizing that customer lifetime value. You could have scenarios where you’re chasing down an invoice that’s, you know, $500 and you’re jeopardizing the overall lifetime

value of the customer because you don’t know that they’re not having some sort of systems disruption or they’re having some sort of service issue or they’re in the middle of transacting with your company as a whole and that could actually, uh, impact that relationship as you look forward. So the way that we’ve been looking at collections is more how does this impact the overall customer lifetime value and how can we bring this view really into the, into the fold, uh, for the overall customer 360? But what we found was that the tools that worked in the old model, they’re, they’re actually the ones that kind of kill your business in the new model. So traditional collections tools really focus on one invoice to one customer, and you know, it’s, it’s a view into the, into the customer, there’s no real view into the customer in-

experience, it’s m- more just the invoices, right? It’s very sort of siloed on an island. The collections team is, you know, hey, you guys go track them down, this is not something I want to do as like a, as a sales team or whatever, so like the, the collections team’s reaching out and really taking on that activity and, and, and, you know, as I talked about, can have, uh, adverse or positive impacts depending on what the timing is with the, the account. Um, and there’s no real way to learn from past behavior. You know, every customer’s sort of treated the same, so there’s not like this contextualization around the customer behavior based on how, you know, they’ve operated as a customer for your company, uh, through the years, right And so that, that led us to realize there’s

kind of three key challenges. Um, one, having visibility into systems, you know, it’s, it’s fragmented, it’s tough to pull together this, this sort of view into the full customer lifecycle. It’s split across different things you can see in here. Many times we talk to customers, they’re working off of a master spreadsheet for collections, they’re trying to bring in all of their collections data, maybe at the BI view or something like that. But you’re trying to keep up with everything that’s happening in CRM, billings, individual emails that have gone out to the customer as well, so if, uh, you know, somebody on the collections team has emailed that customer and then they go out on vacation and you’ve got another agent that’s coming in, they’re not having that traceability relative to who’s emailed who unless you are putting that somewhere in some spreadsheet or some sort

of tooling or whatnot, um, as well. And so it feels like you’re stitching together a lot of different data systems to, to really kind of pull this visibility of the full customer lifecycle. And then second, you’re really trying to work with other customer-facing teams, but staying in sync becomes really tough. And this is a little bit of what you heard me talk about earlier where, you know, scenarios arise where, you know, you’ve got a customer that maybe you’re re- you’re up for a renewal and you’re trying to secure an upsell with, um, and you realize that they haven’t paid a bill for 120 days And you know, you, if your collections team’s reaching out in the middle of that, it could, one,

disrupt your, your renewal and upsell, but maybe it kind of needs to at the same time, two, because do you really want to renew this customer that’s not paying their bills when you actually have a natural sort of contract event in front of you to perhaps, you know, facilitate getting that 120-day bill paid. So finding a way for sales, customer success, collections to be able to understand what’s happening in the, in the account and be able to broker conversations in the right way so that the entire view of the customer is there is really one of the things that becomes hard. Um, (clears throat) you know? And then the third one is really looking forward. I would say one-time payment collections mindset sort of misses the pattern,

uh, over time, right? And we use the term recurring revenue a lot, but really this is what’s been collected so far and what’s, invoices are outstanding, but, um, where are we gonna land? You know, a lot of times I hear, I hear from collections leaders, you know, they’re getting asked a question from their, you know, from their AR, uh, controller or their CAO, maybe the CFO of like, “Hey, listen. Where are we gonna land from a collections standpoint? What’s the cash balance that we’re gonna have? Not just this month but next month, the following month, looking forward? And how do I know that that’s relatively accurate? How much is hedged in it? Can I slice it? Can I dice it? Can I get to a level of detail that gives me confidence to go actually put a number in, uh, to share with our analysts or other people that are involved with the company?” RightUh,

so that’s a really hard thing to do, uh, when you’ve got a lot of different elements that are both sort of, I would say, um, objective and subjective relative to accounts, like people that go into payment plans or other things that come into play, uh, where they are behind and predictability becomes hard to actually come up with, right? And so that’s really why we reimagined collections for modern businesses. Um, you can see some of the things on the left here that we, that we try to focus on, um, and that brought to the forefront, which is adding collections with context. So one of the things that we heard about in the poll was scaling the team while controlling costs, right? Um, and actually

having visibility into the full customer view was another one that was of, of importance here. So protecting relationships and accelerating payments by having the view into the history of all the outreach that’s happening to the customer and being able to actually outreach to customers based on, say, their risk profile or their past payment behavior, how much they actually spend with your cust- your company. Maybe they need a little bit more white-glove treatment. But I need to be able to do that at scale, and I need to do it in a way where I’m not having to add heads to go do that, but I need it to be contextualized to those accounts. So I need to be able to push out, uh, outreaches to those customers to drive the, the fastest, you know, collectability in the account and drive the LTV in the account, uh, in the best way possible.

And so Zuora does that. I’ll show you a little glimpse of it here in a second. Um, and then seeing the full picture from order to cash, tracking every order, invoice, collection activity, so that 360 I was telling you about as well, so the collections is not operating in a silo. And then bringing AI into all of this. At the end of the day, providing insights, forecasting payment behavior as well, cash, uh, cash outlook as, as we talked about as well, expected cash flow, actual cash flows, all of that, um, and prioritizing outreach pat- based on patterns from your own customer base as well. So risk scoring, things like that, where AI is taking a large part in helping to scale this team, uh, this collections team and, and bring, bring in cash flow and predict where you’re going to land as well.

So here’s a ti- quick taste of this though. I’ll kind of hit through a few of these… I’ll hit through a few of these, um, slides and then I’ll actually jump into a little bit of product. I know folks are going to want to see that. I think it matters, especially if you sign up for a webinar, you want to see a little bit of product. So I’ll just give you a quick on this. Um, so giving collections the full customer picture was one of the things we focused on. Uh, syncing customer payment history with collection status in s- in s- with Salesforce. So this actually comes, um, with, uh, connection to Salesforce where all the open AR invoices, uh, payments, credit memos, you know, what’s been paid, what’s not, wha- what activity has happened in the account actually gets synced with Salesforce. You can actually task, um, anybody that’s a Salesforce user. A lot of times, the story that we tell in that scenario is that like, “Hey, listen, I’ve got that

outstanding… uh, you know, I’m trying to do a deal with a customer, uh, but the, the, the, the outstanding balance is 120 days overdue.” Now I can actually task sales within Salesforce using Salesforce tasks directly from the platform so that they can actually use the relationships and leverage that they have in the account to help us, you know, help us get paid Um, that’s really nice when you have a connection to Salesforce where you can actually kick this off, assign that s- that, that, that task in Salesforce. That could be to somebody as well if you’ve got like a different type of model. Could be customer success or sales engineering or anybody that’s really using s- uh, Salesforce in that, in that capacity. That also includes being able to s- w- to assign tasks in Slack as well, if you guys are Slack users. So a lot of people working in

Slack, being able to track the activity back and forth and reassign tasks, close out tasks, whatnot, also, uh, fits in there as well. Um, and then, um, as you can see kinda on the right of the screen over here, you can see all the different types of activities and things that are there. Zuora, for a long time, did not have the concept of a dispute object within the platform, or the idea of a promise to pay. Promise to pay is when somebody has, uh, ex- gone over their, their payment date and they don’t have the ability to pay right now in the moment, but they promise to pay later, right? So they may say, “Can, can I pay you in 30 days? Can I pay you in 15 days?” whatever that may be. So now we have the ability to actually follow these things, to carry these actions out within the platform, understand what the reasons behind these

are and actually track those customer moments within the platform, which is really, really powerful. Those are also used to then project into the future for forecasting relative to cash balances. So if I’ve got a promise to pay that’s in there across one customer, across one invoice, um, and I’ve got 75 other of those for cross- 75 other customers, I need to understand that so that I can project into the future what my, what my cash balance is going to be And so the, the platform does that. And you can see all of that contextualized relative to the emails, the call logs, any of these specific things are in chronological order, and you can see them across the accounts as a whole. On top of that, you can actually send, uh, smarter outreach, not generic reminders. So you heard me talking about providing scale to the team

as well as having contextualized outreach as well. Um, so you can see in this bottom right, sort of a set of campaigns that can be th- uh, created. You can actually cr- set criteria for specific segments of your customer base. Number one, the platform itself has AI built in to set an actual health score like you see in the middle of the page, so you can actually assign based on, um, what their, what their payment history has been, what their, their overall behavior with it, how many invoices do they have outstanding and what buckets are they? What’s that amount? What’s their DSO as a whole? How have they been operating? Are they sort of a low-risk or high-risk customer? Are they a high-value customer or are they a specific, you know, some sort of segment that you need to treat in a, in a very specific mannerUm, but not do that with, like, manual outreach

by an agent. So we have the ability to actually create campaigns within the s- within the platform for segments of customer base. Those can be automated and they set an- a- a s- a whole sequence of events of outreach that you can take advantage of as well to help scale the team while also contextualizing for the customers. Um, the, uh, you heard me talk about s- Salesforce and Slack as well, so I won’t co- I won’t come back on those, but, uh, the idea is here is to add scale to the team and do that. And then also being able to forecast cash with confidence, so going beyond aging reports as well. Um, one of the things I know if you guys, if anybody here is a Zoro billing user, um, as a whole, um, you know, DSO is one, one

metric that folks have really, really wanted to bring to the forefront. That is something that comes right out of the box as a part of this, um, in terms of tracking it and being able to track that at various, like, in- extremely low levels of granularity within the platform as well, and so, um, enhancing that cashflow forecasting with AI powered predictive analytics. So we talked about, uh, looking into the future if I have all these different promise to pays across all these accounts or disputes or whatever it may be, uh, we actually bring AI into the forecasting to come up with, uh, a very accurate expected cashflow over the coming months as you look forward. The same thing for, um, days sales outstanding and, uh, and average days to pay as well. Those are also big, big, big, uh, areas that p- that teams wanna be

aware of. It also helps us to identify at-risk accounts early with real-time data and then we can actually launch some of those campaigns that you saw on the, uh, slides previous. (clears throat) So I’m gonna pause here for a second. I’m gonna jump out. Please do not judge me on all of my tabs on, across the top of my screen. But I’m just gonna give you guys a quick taste of some of the platform here. So if anybody here is familiar with Zoro’s layout, um, and especially if you’re a Zoro One ID, um, this is basically how it would fit within there. The navigation is very similar to everything you’ve seen. This is on the Zoro platform and you would come up here to your Z apps, click on Zoro collections, and this is basically the dashboard you would see sent in front of you day one, right, as you log in. Um,

within this page, you can also see customers. Y- there’s just a whole lot of different functionality here, I’m not gonna go through all of it, I’m gonna reinforce some of the things that we just talked about a second ago. But, uh, I would just go into an account, say Microsoft. Here you can actually see my risk score associated with Microsoft. This is all example data just for the record. You can see who’s assigned from a collection owner standpoint, what status they’re in, if they’re assigned to any specific campaign within the platform as well, which I’ll touch on in a second, what their credit term’s on or h- what their average days to pay and DSO is, right? You can actually see real time aging, no more running of a batch job to get to a trial balance and understand what the aging looks like af- off of that. This actually comes over in real time. You can see

all of the activity on the account relative to invoices and payments, credit notes, all of those types of things. You heard me talking about activities and having chronological order of those, so here I can actually see tasks that are assigned relative to the account, what’s happened, they assigned up for a promise to pay, they have a payment, they had a payment, they have all this different activity, any emails that are going back and forth between the customer as well. One of the things if you’ve used Zoro’s outreach methods before on the billing side of the house is, you can send the notifications to customers, but a lot of times if they have, they respond and say, “Hey listen, I have a question about this,” or whatever, you’re immediately then relegated to, you know, working in your own email. This actually will integrate and track responses and interactions with the customer. So if, you know, Jessica Miller goes out on

vacation for a week and, you know, Steve, uh, Johnson comes in to, to fill the place on this account for the week, all of that activity is then tracked across the account for visibility, right? So having that visibility into the customer account, whether those com- those, whether those, uh, tasks are being completed in Salesforce by sales folks that are getting involved or, um, you know, that’s in- outgoing, you know, ongoing outreach that’s from the automated fashion relative to campaigns or the responses from the customer and back and forth(…) . All of that is tracked here within the platform so you have visibility to that as well. Um, second, when I think about this from more of, like, uh, like, a collections manager perspective, I started thinking about, um, the, the contextualized outreach and coming up with campaigns.

So if I wanted to look at driving, um, you know, driving more, uh, AR inbound to, um, into the company, I might wanna look at how my customer, customers are, are set up, right? So I actually might come up with these different campaigns, these collection strategies. These are, what’s really cool about this is that these are in the platform, you can configure these as a user. You don’t need IT, you don’t need anybody to do this. You can actually set up the rules for how you want to get these set up. Um, you can define the criteria for who fits in what segments, you can track, you know, what’s happened within those, pre-do reminders and the sequence of events that are associated with them. You can actually add invoice segments, so if you want to only send notifications out based on invoices or payments or invoices over a certain amount, perhaps you can do that.

This, uh, this allows you to do a few more things than this traditional outreach from Zoro. One is you can segment your customer base so it’s not one size fits all. It also allows you to set cadences, uh, within here and actually assign tasks to specific agents or people that are associated with a call. Perhaps that’s even to sales at some point to say, “Hey, after day 30, assign a task to sales.” That’s gonna go through to Salesforce, through the out of the box connection. A task is gonna show up in Salesforce to sign that AE to say, “Hey, I need you to help me pay, get this, this invoice paid or get, you know, get this statement outstanding balance paid.” Um, right? Conversely, in Salesforce, uh, the visibility to that balance is there as well.And so, they’ll be able to see any sort of the outstanding and be aware of anything that’s

going o- ongoing within that account too, so those things can match up and they can have a successful conversation with the customer. The idea here is you can actually do these pre, th- these outreaches. Th- these can attach invoices, statements, whatever. Yes, I said statements. Statements are a part of the platform, which is really, really welcomed and great. You can also do, um, any sort of CCs and all that type of stuff. You can assign segments and rules. Here, just to give you an example of like a- a task, here I’m actually assigning the ta- the collection owner to call the customer, uh, at ten days in, right, after they’ve… you know, ten days overdue essentially. And I can even do things like set a follow-up action with that. So, a- after ten days, if like at day 15, um, that task hasn’t been completed, I can remind that agent to call them again,

right? It’s, uh, invisible to the customer, but, uh, something that you can take action on, and you can do escalations and repeat and all that type of different things, uh, to increase language, change language as well, uh, as a whole. We’re gonna be r- very, very soon as well, we’re going to be bringing in… Sorry. Excuse me. I clicked on the wrong one here. Uh, bringing in AI into this to actually recommend language for these outreaches as well as, uh, recommendations on the sequencings of ou- of outreach so that you can drive the best results that you possibly can for your, uh, collections team. Uh, this same strategy here on the invoice side of the house can also be, uh, completed over here on the statement side of the house as well, or you can do either/or. You can change them up, make them slightly different and handle them slightly

different depending on however you wanna handle it as a whole, but you kinda get the idea of the outreach. Um, at any given… What I would… One of the things that I personally really like about this, having, you know, worked at… I- I- I worked at Zuora for 11 years. I’ve done everything from implementations of some of our largest customers to running our, uh, global sales engineering team and customer success teams as a whole. I recently took on this role, but I- I- I’ve run into these use cases relative to Zuora in the past where folks have wanted, uh, some of these capabilities, and one of the things I really love is this ability to pause and resume the- the- the follow-ups based on specific things that can happen. So, if at any given time during this outreach sequence above, you know, the customer responds, I can actually pause and not continue to spam them with a bunch of emails and-

and outreach, or maybe they agree to, um, open up a promise to pay or they just say they’ve got a dispute, uh, relative to one of the invoices. Like, I think one of the things that’s pretty powerful is if you’ve got this on invoice and there’s an issue with one invoice, but there’s not an issue with three other invoices, it’ll stop the outreach relative to this invoice, but the three other ones, it can continue, or it can do the same for the statement, right? So the- the ability to sort of throttle the outreach and make it smart to where you’re not over-spamming, but you’re also, you know, really, like, carrying out a smart strategy as well is there And obviously, if you want to, uh, stop follow-up because the invoice is paid off or the statement is paid off as a whole, it will automatically do so, and it will do these on the account time zones as well. So, a lot of brains within it. Um, the other piece that I would

talk about, so here we talked about, um, you know, just looking at and bringing visibility into the activity within the customer base, right? So, bringing in into that Customer 360 through being able to see what’s on the activity, engaging other teams in actually the collections activities, like we talked about with Salesforce. Here, we just talked about actually segmenting and doing contextualized outreach at scale, so adding scale for your team so they’re not having to manually send these out. The system’s waking up. It’s looking at the balances. It’s looking at the segments of customer. It’s carrying out these outreaches. And at any given time, your agents can then look at, like, the responses that come from customers or really work the accounts that are really, uh, problematic or large balances or the most outstanding and- and really prioritize their day doing so that way.

Now, I’ll also look at the- the- the look forward, right? So, we talked about projecting cash flow into the future as another part of collections as a whole, and so one of the things when you first log into the platform is the visibility into your metrics as a whole collections team. That could be sorted through, you know, the entire company, direct reports, any sort of slices and dices based on your metadata. These are examples for business units or regions. Product lines could be a part of this. This can go all the way down to the individual account levels. And by the way, if you’re constantly working with large enterprises that have multiple subsidiaries and structures within them, this actually supports working with that as well.

So, if you’ve got, I don’t know, Comcast, for example, as your- as a customer that you work with and, you know, they’ve got Universal and Universal Studios and whatever other, uh, levels of- of- of companies underneath them and, you know, Comcast is paying for some of those bills and Universal is paying for some of those bills All of that can be tracked and rolled up through the hierarchical structure. You can actually tailor the outreaches as appropriate, and you can see within each account even what the- what the- what the stats for this type of stuff are, what the KPIs are, right? You can see the… So, I could see Universal’s DSO versus Comcast DSO versus Universal Studios, whatever it might be, right? To give an example. Um, within that, you can actually look at analysis and see and- and project into the future. So, we talked about

AI risk scoring and looking at past behaviors. We talked about doing that on a more macro level, uh, across the entire, uh, book of business that you’re looking to bring in from a cash perspective, and here you can actually see forecasting into the future, uh, as you look forward. So, this is customizable. I’ve got it to, like, four or five months right now with demo data, but you get the idea of actual payments being applied, predicted cash flow in these- in these lines. So, as you look out into the future, you can see the predicted cash flow within here and understand what that looks like. You can also, uh, slice and di- dice these as well. It supports multi-currency… and those types of things as you want to go look at subsets of your business and be able to provide looks at that. So if you’ve got different, I don’t know, if you’ve got different, um, cohorts of,

of customers that you loo- like, look at and want to slice and dice that way, you can do it that way. You can do it by region, product line, BU, whatever sort of floats your boat and, uh, and, and gets you to the level of what you need. Same thing with DSO trending and average days to pay, so you can see some of these things here. And then one of my favorites, and all this data is exportable, usable, uh, as well, and one of my favorite things as a whole is really trending on aging. So these are com- customizable aging buckets as a whole, but you can kind of see the trending over time as you move forward. This would be a really good trend where from June of 2024 you’ve got, uh, the highest amount in the 90, greater than 90-day bucket, and as you come down through time, that’s coming down through time and moving more into the less than 30-day bucket,

um, as a whole, right? So you can see that trending to see how the business is performing as well, and you can even measure collector performance. So part of obviously managing a team is understanding how they’re performing to their targets. You can see the activities that they’re performing, such as tasks or calls logged, emails sent, all of that gets tracked within the platform. So if coaching is needed, measurement against their targets is, is, uh, very clear and they have visibility to it, you have visibility to it. Uh, getting, getting involved and having a, a team mentality relative to going and attacking this, this problem on a day-to-day basis is, is part and parcel to the actual, you know, manager working with this tool, uh, in their day-to-day job, right? (clears throat) So I’ll pause there on the demonstration purposes

and I’ll jump back into our, our presentation here. One of the things you might be asking yourself is sort of, where does this fit within the overall platform and, and what does Zuora do? So this is kind of just a depiction of it. If you guys are billing or revenue users, you’re used to these boxes over here. This is just, uh, a pullout to say, like, “Hey, listen, on Zuora collection system, the Zuora platform, these are some of the capabilities that we bring to bear, um, around segmentation and prioritization.” You saw me, uh, looking at that relative to collections campaigns and, uh, looking at risk scoring and things like that as well. You can see automated collection strategies around the com- campaigns, so it’s just contextualized. Uh, you can see the tracking on collections and collaboration and dispute management, reporting

and analytics as I showed, visibility to AR. The other piece of that, I’d say, is that this obviously integrates with Salesforce, as we talked about, and Slack. Um, Salesforce, it will bring in all the outstanding… it will bring in all of the AR-related details to the accounts. Um, you can actually report on that data in Salesforce too, if you want, relative to the overall book of business. Um, you can assign tasks as well. Fi- uh, Slack is also more focused on task assignment and completion, you know, coming back, um, you know, assigning somebody to, to work on something as well. And then we also have, I don’t have it shown here today, uh, but if you’re interested it’s something else we can talk about, is we actually have a customer-facing web portal that’s available that will actually allow, um, um, companies to, companies or customers, the predefined users,

to log in, be able to view their outstanding balances, uh, look at any emails and invoices. They can actually create promise to pays, um, and, and update contact information. They can file disputes, things like that. You can throttle the level of what you want to allow them to be able to do within that portal, but it does allow for a way for customers to sort of self-service some of this stuff so that you have better, um, you have a better (clears throat), um, way for them to be able to, to interact with you if they don’t necessarily want to pick up the phone or, or do emails as a whole. So that’s sort of where it fits in the greater scheme of things, and if you don’t, you know, if you, if you really want to see, um, more on this, like, w- here’s some of the results that we’ve seen from some of our customer base, right?

Um, Greenhouse a big customer o- of ours. We’ve seen reductions in time to collect and collection tasks, bad debt reductions, accuracy and cash flow forecasting as well. Later on, later on this year, we’re, we’re probably going to also look at, at doing a cash application or payment to invoice matching capability as well for all those folks that work on that side of the house. I’m not gonna get into any detail on that now, but that is another area we’re going to be going on because Zuora’s highly focused on driving, you know, business impacts for folks in this area of, of, of responsibility and function, and so we want to get better, we want to provide more value for collections teams, the collections agents, for the overall AR function as a whole. That’s an area we are investing heavily in. This

hopefully is a, a very fine way of showing that investment. Um, if you are very interested in, if you’re interested in seeing more, happy to go through that as, with you as well. And we have one more poll for you before I cut you free. Uh, uh, not cut you free, before we do the Q&A, excuse me. I apologize. I got ahead of myself there. So we’re gonna launch a, a quick poll and then I’ll try and do a little bit of Q&A for anything that, um, that has come through, um, that I need to take a, take away. We will also send out the follow-up answers to all those, those questions as well. So for the poll, please go ahead.

Excellent. It looks like a lot of you are interested. This is great. Um, I really appreciate the, the interest in the platform. We would love to, to spend more time. I can go in a lot level of detail. You’ll probably even see me presenting to you. I can bring other folks to the conversation as well. Before we cut everybody free, we did have some Q&A. Um-I will leave this up as- instead of that. So a couple of the questions that came up within the poll that I- I’ll just kind of try and address right here, right now, um, uh, I’ve got them up here, is the first question is, “For the follow-up rules and processes…” so this is relative to the, um, segmented email, uh, outreach that we showed where you can actually launch a collections campaign for a segment of your customers. The question is,

“Can it specify by account and by invoice?” The answer is yes, it can. It can specify both by account and by invoice and you can throttle it to your heart’s content whether it’s, you want particular invoices, you only want invoices of a certain size, you want to do the entire account, you want to do both, all, none. Any way you want to do it, the answer is yes for that question. Second question: “Are there integrations available for dialer email campaigns as well as online payment portals for customers?” The answer for that as well is yes. So we have integrations to I- dialers for, uh, call logs, for things like that, for inbounds if you want to do that. There’s also an a- an ability to have an AR inbox set up as well, so if you’ve got inbound just general queries that come from customers

and you want to assign those out to specific agents, or you want to have everybody come and pitch in and resolve those as they come in as well as, you know, have their own individual inboxes, they can do that, uh, to respond to those. Um, and those are available for the campaigns as well. And then for payment portals, online payment portals for customers, yes, there are integrations available for those, uh, payment portals as well. Um, and we can talk to you more in detail about that. That gets a little, um, it gets a little, l- little, like, I’d say granular, uh, for the webinar right now, but happy to talk in detail with anybody that wants to go through those payment portals, supplier portal integrations as a whole, and talk to you in detail about that. But the answer there is yes as well. The third question that we have is, “How much effort is required to set up this new product?” So

this is kind of a tough one to answer when it’s a large group of, of people, but, uh, I will say this, right? If you’re, um, if you’re used to using Zuora, the level- the level of effort to set this up is much less, right? The, uh, you know, Zuora as a whole, um, is really robust in some of the billing things there. Uh, and- and there’s complex use cases that come up that, that take some more, you know, configuration to do those. For example, like, you know, uh, you know, uh, usage-based or- or- or, um, consumption-based use cases that are complex. Over time those things can become complicated. This is pretty simple. This is actually syncing just account-related data and fields and thing- and, and contact-related data. It’s syncing invoices, it is syncing

payments and credit memos over, and then it’s really, a lot of this, the configuration is more so setting up those collections campaigns, setting up the users, setting up the things that you would like, uh, from a behavior perspective. So it’s more like designing how you want your collections experience to work, setting up the integration to Salesforce or Slack, things like that. Um, in general, I- it’s been, I would say, like, the- the general rule of thumb that I’ve been using as we’ve talked to our particular customers about this is, um, it’s- it’s been about one fifth, um, the level of effort, size, time, compared to, you know, the Zuora Billing rollouts, uh, as a whole. Um, I can… You know, this is something that we can actually turn around. We- Zuora itself runs this collections tool, obviously. We rolled it out

in, uh, five- four to five weeks. Um, we- you can also scale how you roll it out. So if you want to just roll out one collections campaign and get in the market and then learn and then create more because you’re gonna be using it more, you can do it that way. Um, we have a large, we have a large customer that does video online streaming right now that, uh, has- is gonna be putting about, uh, $200 million worth of collections outstanding revenue through the business, and they’re, uh, across multiple different business units and divisions and their total ramp- their total, uh, launch time’s gonna be about eight weeks, uh, to go live as well. So significantly less from- from what you probably are expecting. I hope that helps to provide a little bit of context relative to the effort required to set up the new product. It’s also pretty intuitive for users

as well. Um, and then there’s a question, “Does everything feed from existing Zuora instance?” That’s a- it’s sort of a- a loaded question in a great way. Um, I- I’ll answer this in two ways. One, any of the billing data that you have in Zuora, invoices, payments, all that type of stuff, it automatically comes in. Zuora manages all that, how that, you know, how that data gets across. It’s sitting on the platform together so it’s- it’s simple for us. If you have invoices, credit memos, d- things that are in other systems, perhaps, you know, Zuora’s doing a part of your billing, you’ve got another billing system that’s doing some billing and has invoices there for other business lines, or you’ve got- maybe you’ve even got multiple, you can actually bring those into the system as well and do collections from here. So if you want to do centralized collections with it, if you actually, you know, in the future

when we get into cash applications, same rule apply there as well. Um, but you can actually centralize that- that ability within the platform, so if you want to use this for broader than just Zuora collections, you can do so. And, uh, and, um, and you can actually, you know, uh, do all the things we talked about and record all those activities as well. Um, and then I think there was one last question re- regarding NetSuite, and it was, “Is it- is it compatible with NetSuite?” And the answer is yes, it is. And in fact there’s actually a connection to NetSuite for ERP relative to, uh, to that. This is com- the way that this whole system we designed it was that we wanted to be able to have integration to any ERP, so Sage or Intacct or Oracle or SAP, we wanted to be able to do that. Its APIs

are available to do that. We’ve done integration to all these same things with supplier portals, and we wanted to be able to take in invoices from any system so we could actually do collections for- for even bills that didn’t come from our particular, uh, billing sys- uh, from our particular, uh, billing system, right? So the idea is, you know, it’s one, it is compatible with these ERPs. There is actually a connector for NetSuite to answer that one question, and integrations to all of these different ERPs as well as the- the other billing systems and other systems within the ecosystem are all readily, uh, available and have been done.All right. And I’ve got like eight more questions that come through. I’m gonna maybe take a quick peruse of these and pick out a couple, uh, to hit those. Um,

how to… Um, there’s questions in here, um, “Does the pack- does this package include draft legal collections notice?” We can do that, yes. If you have a legal notice that you want to use and you want to make that a part of the outreach and do that, you can do that. You can actually even store those legal notices and anything that’s been signed as well within the account too, so that’s a good question to ask, right? So sometimes we have promissory notes that get signed and, and set up for payment plans and things like that. If you want to do that and store that within the platform, you can do so. Um, it’s more robust in that capacity for, for size and storage and, and collectibility and, or and for tracking on the account. And, “Is the pricing structure based on user model or is it based on market cap size of the customer?”

Um, I’ll say this, um, pricing is, is more focused on the value that we bring, um, for you in the collections space. Uh, traditionally this is, is, um, you know, much cheaper than, than Zoho billing and, and Zoho revenue, even in terms of the offering. Um, as it- as we look at your- as we look at your individual need for collections, we can give you a, a good solid, uh, rom on what you think that the license would be in any level of effort for, uh, implementation as we work with you. So if that, that’s a- an area where you want to learn a little bit more, please do, you know, select and we will- we will reach out to you and talk to you a little bit more about the pricing. But know that it’s, um, um, it’s- it’s a little bit less than Zoh- you know, it’s more less (laughs) more less, it’s

a lot- it’s a fair amount less than, uh, than billing and, and revenue as a whole. Um, okay. So I think that brings… I’ve got a few other questions that are a little bit more complex. I’m going to take those offline. We will formulate some specific responses for those and get them out to everybody here that is in attendance. I wanted to say thank you to everybody here that has attended today. I hope you’ve learned a little bit more. If you are interested, please do click that Talk to Expert. We’re also tracking that poll that we asked if anybody’s l- interested in learning more. So if you, if you have that, please do. And if you have, look, if you’ve got direct questions you’d like to ask me, my, my email is chad, C-H-A-D, .conley, C-O-N-L-E-Y @zoho.com. I am happy to engage with you, talk with you more about

it and, and address any of the certain use cases or questions that you might have, uh, on the platform, even if you don’t want to necessarily engage in a, in an opportunity or sales cycle at the moment, just because you’re curious, I’m happy to do that as well. So thank you all for the time today. Really hope this was informative and, uh, appreciate it. Thank you very much and we will be in touch with some answers to the last Q&As