The following partner insight was authored by Carolyn Skarr, Senior Manager of Alliance Marketing at InvoiceCloud.

By the time a digital billing and payment platform goes live, the organization behind it has spent months on evaluation, procurement, and implementation. What typically receives far less attention is what happens after, during the adoption phase—and that's where most platforms either deliver ROI or quietly fail. 

A modern payment portal integrated with your SAP environment does not reduce call volumes or cut print and mail costs if most of your customers are unaware they have options to pay electronically and are still paying the way they always have.

For SAP customers who have lived through S/4HANA migrations, this should sound familiar. The implementation is not where value is realized. Years of organizational change, process redesign, and user enablement that follow the technical go-live are what determine whether a project delivers on its business case. Digital billing and payments work the same way—on a smaller but no less consequential scale.

Two InvoiceCloud customers at very different ends of the complexity spectrum illustrate what happens when a vendor stays engaged after go-live.

Where the Real Work Starts

A rural electric cooperative serving 59 communities across Alaska has a billing problem that most utilities will never face. Only one of its service communities is connected by road. The rest are only accessible by plane, and mail delivery can be delayed by a week or more after a storm. 

Many members in these communities live off the land, keeping freezers stocked with food they’d hunted and fished. A missed payment in this context is not a late fee, but the potential loss of months of provisions.

Before going live with a new payment platform in June 2021, the co-op had fewer than 10 members on autopay and no paperless billing option at all. An initial outreach through email, the co-op’s website, and social media, quickly grew the autopay base into the hundreds.

But the real acceleration came next, when the co-op and the InvoiceCloud adoption team took everyone who had signed up for autopay and notified them that they would be moved to paperless billing by default. Of the roughly 400 contacted, only 10 opted out.

Today, the co-op has more than 1,600 members on autopay and over 5,000 on paperless. At more than $2 per mailed invoice, paperless enrollment alone saves the organization upwards of $10,000 per month, and customer service staff who once fielded payment calls can now focus on other member needs.

None of this required the co-op to stand up a marketing operation. InvoiceCloud brought the playbook and the campaign resources, handled the sequencing, and tracked what worked.

More Than a Payment Portal

When a fast-growing Texas municipality serving more than 60,000 residents deployed a digital payment platform in 2021, adoption was not the initial priority. The city just needed a reliable way for customers to pay online.

InvoiceCloud’s adoption services team then worked with city staff to layer a series of engagement tactics over time—transitioning customers already paying by ACH onto the new system, defaulting new accounts to paperless, embedding payment links in onboarding materials, and running vendor-supported autopay and paperless campaigns. QR codes went up at service windows.

Individually, none of these tactics were complex. Together—and properly sequenced—they drove sustained adoption. 

The result has been online payment adoption that has stayed above 80% and more than $430,000 in print and mail savings since going live in 2021. With that much routine payment processing off their plates, the billing team found something it hadn’t had in years: capacity. Staff who had spent their days taking payment-related calls and manually posting transactions were promoted into supervisory roles.

A Pattern Emerges

These examples reflect a wider trend across InvoiceCloud’s customer base of more than 3,250 billers. On average, customers see a 45% increase in e-payment adoption and a 70% increase in paperless enrollment within their first year on the platform.

The City of Charlottesville, an SAP customer running InvoiceCloud, posted even steeper gains in its first year live on the InvoiceCloud platform: a 173% increase in digital adoption, a 133% jump in paperless enrollment, and a sixfold increase in autopay registrations.

Billers who participate in marketing onboarding and continued marketing programs sponsored by InvoiceCloud and make heavy use of InvoiceCloud’s Marketing Resource Center consistently outperform peers who don’t, by as much as 4–6% in early adoption.

The pattern is consistent: adoption doesn't happen passively—it's driven, measured, and improved over time. 

A SaaS billing provider is successful when its clients are successful. So, both parties win when online transaction volume increases.

What To Look for in a Partner

When evaluating digital payment partners, organizations should give post-sale support as much attention as features, integrations, and price. If your vendor doesn't have a defined adoption plan with measurable goals, you're taking on that responsibility yourself.  

At InvoiceCloud, that defined adoption plan follows five phases:

• Assessment of current marketing activity and adoption baselines
• Benchmarking against industry peers
• Collaborative goal-setting using custom and pre-built marketing programs
• Targeted campaigns designed around your customer base and adoption goals
• Ongoing reviews to track results and recalibrate goals

Selecting the most capable platform is a critical first step. But the organizations extracting the most from their billing and payment investments didn’t stop there; the winners are the organizations whose partners stay after go-live, bring a plan, and share accountability for making it work.

Carolyn Skarr is Senior Manager of Alliance Marketing at InvoiceCloud.