The Income Management / Payment Solution Landscape

It is against that backdrop our customers needed to react to citizen expectations, which are typically driven by their retail and social experiences out there in the ‘real world’. The increased need for modern, connected, usable and accessible payment systems has become paramount for any organisation that wants to ensure that its citizens, students or customers are receiving the service that they both require and expect. Whether an organisation is based within the private or public sector there is also a need to ensure that the way that they can interact with the organisation is as easy and seamless as possible.

To address these issues the HeyCentric team advocate using a solution that provides maximum customisation and accessibility options to your citizens, students and / or customers. People across the spectrum now expect to interact digitally and (importantly) expect to do so using systems that are clear and concise to use. Language support and other such features are essential in today’s world and not only ensure the end user is confident and comfortable when conducting their business online, but it also has the secondary effect of ensuring that your revenue collection strategies are more effective and total cost of ownership of a solution is pushed lower.

Finally, whilst ensuring that citizens have a portal that they are confident to use and supports their varying needs, it is also essential that back-end systems are able to provide exceptional income management capabilities. Up to the minute analysis of payments received not only gives an organisation a significant benefit in terms of cash flow management and strategy, but crucially it ensures that their citizens, student and / or customers can also be confident that their payments count. This manifests itself in many ways but is a strong point to end this article on. In some cases, these ‘joined up systems’ can simply guarantee that a citizen can be reassured by an agent (for example, within a local authority) that their payment has been received (in real time). Other (more serious) situation can be as critical as ensuring a bailiff is not instructed to take action because the system is able to cope with (the likely scenario) that a payment preventing action is received just before a payment deadline is breached.

It is these real-world examples that affect real people which are crucial to the decisions organisations take in deciding what income management solution they select and what ‘front of house’ accompanying payment systems they publish. It is for these reasons that the HeyCentric team are passionate about the software, experience and services that they provide to organisations in cementing good practices, increased income collection and (most importantly) delivering value to citizens and stakeholders that use such systems on a regular basis. With the advent of COVID this has become even more significant and having the right systems in place to facilitate day to day life activities has never been more paramount.