Novartis Animal Health
Powerful credit card processing solution enhances customer service
Profile
Novartis Animal Health, the animal health division of Novartis (NYSE:NVS), is a global provider of animal pharmaceuticals and health products to veterinarians. Novartis Animal Health is at the forefront of new and better treatments for the most common pet ailments such as internal parasites, fleas, renal, heart and allergic diseases.
For livestock and farmed fish diseases, Novartis Animal Health offers prevention through vaccination as well as therapeutic products to treat parasitic and bacterial infections. Novartis Animal Health, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, employs approximately 2200 people worldwide, and is represented in almost 40 countries. www.ah.novartis.com
Challenge
Successful organizations all over the world have made significant investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. These crucial efforts have paid off with superior customer service and long-term customer retention that drives profit straight to the bottom line. But competition has intensified, and customers now demand flexible and secure payment options as an integral part of the complete business relationship.
"Through exemplary customer relations with our veterinarian clients around the world, Novartis Animal Health has established a strong reputation for keeping pets healthy and happy," says Terisa Horton, Accounting Operations Manager with Novartis Animal Health. "We are always looking for opportunities to improve our customer experience. After our SAP implementation, we needed a secure payment transaction solution that offered our clients a wide variety of electronic payment options, including recurring monthly payment via credit card. We also wanted a solution that would integrate seamlessly and perform well within our SAP environment, enhancing our customers' experience while streamlining the our customer relations and finance operations.".
Paymetric Solution
Horton ultimately selected Paymetric because the company has a strong reputation for superior customer satisfaction and is a certified SAP software partner. According to Horton, Paymetric's suite of payment solutions around the XiPayTM Server also offered a number of SAP Extensions that uniquely matched her needs, including an encryption component for secure payment transactions.
Horton also chose to implement Paymetric's Metro AR solution because it provides Novartis customers with the option of automatically clearing open invoices at month-end with a credit card, a feature that is not offered from within the standard SAP environment. Horton was further impressed with several custom features that the Paymetric team brought to the ultimate solution, including a feature that allows Novartis customers to store multiple credit cards within the system.
"The Paymetric team was great to work with and demonstrated a superior knowledge of SAP," Horton says. "In fact, installation and customization of the Paymetric solution was conducted remotely, reducing Paymetric's response time while providing the ability to resolve issues quickly throughout the implementation process. This saved us considerable time and money."
Results
Empowered by the industry-leading payment processing solution, Novartis obtained immediate and noticeable benefits. Credit card payments are easily processed against unpaid invoices automatically in scheduled jobs, or manually by customer service reps. Custom reporting features made it much more efficient to reconcile bank deposits with settlement batch submissions from SAP.
"Our internal accounting processes immediately became more efficient," says Horton. "One customer relations supervisor estimates that her department can now process payments almost 100 percent faster. In addition, our credit card coordinator says the time she spends submitting accounts for settlement and reconciling balances has been cut in half. And up to this point, our accounting department was limited to running batches under $1 million. Paymetric's solution allows us to process batches without limit now."
"Our internal accounting processes immediately became more efficient," says Horton. "One customer relations supervisor estimates that her department can now process payments almost 100 percent faster. In addition, our credit card coordinator says the time she spends submitting accounts for settlement and reconciling balances has been cut in half. And up to this point, our accounting department was limited to running batches under $1 million. Paymetric's solution allows us to process batches without limit now."
"Customer satisfaction is a large part of gaining a competitive advantage in today's marketplace," Horton says. "If our customers find the payment experience faster and more pleasant, it will likely contribute to their decision to purchase products from us in the future."
