Palmer Holland: Leveraging Multiple Solutions to Optimize Efficiency & Growth

CHALLENGES

Streamline manually intensive processes to gain efficiencies & meet growth goals

Palmer Holland is a North American specialty chemical and ingredient distributor of raw materials, and from a growth standpoint, the company is booming. In order to maintain and promote further growth without having to grow headcount, Palmer Holland decided to automate its most manually intensive processes with Esker: customer inquiries management, order management and collections management. “Part of our vision is to improve processes by subtraction, and to leverage automation wherever possible,” said Charlie Laurie, CIO at Palmer Holland.

Prior to automation, email was heavily relied on for process management and customer inquiries, with one employee dedicating at least four hours a day to routing emails to CSRs. Its order management process was also challenging and required CSRs to check many boxes just to enter an order.

Palmer Holland’s collections process used to demand constant back-and-forth communication with customers and didn’t offer a way for customers to make ACH or credit card payments, creating significant slowdowns when collecting cash. Luckily, Esker’s suite of AI-driven solutions was able to address the biggest obstacles affecting Palmer Holland’s process efficiency.

"It replaces a lot of manual order entry for CSRs, so they’ve been able to get that time back in their day. Now they can just focus on managing the orders in our ERP system instead of validating them. Esker has been very helpful in that regard."
Aiza Toor | Customer Service Manager, Palmer Holland

SOLUTION

Utilizing automation as much as possible

With the AI-driven functionalities provided by Esker’s Customer Inquiries Management, Order Management and Collections Management solutions, Palmer Holland is on the fast track to reaching its performance and growth goals.

Using automated inquiry classification and routing, the Customer Inquiries Management solution provides CSRs a collaborative platform to triage and analyze all 5,000 of Palmer Holland’s monthly customer requests quickly and easily.

The Customer Inquiries Management solution seamlessly integrated with Esker’s Order Management solution to accurately route order-related questions and eliminate the timeconsuming data entry once required by CSRs. Esker’s order template library also greatly simplified the order entry process.

Esker’s Collections Management solution provides the visibility needed to manage Palmer Holland’s receivables and collect cash faster — including an online self-service portal that offers customers a convenient way to make ACH and card payments, ask questions, apply credits and more, all in one place.

Palmer Holland also elected rapid deploy implementation, which aligned with its desire to move faster and grow quicker.

“It takes maybe a second or two to validate an inquiry now. The time savings is one of the biggest benefits.”
Aiza Toor | Customer Service Manager, Palmer Holland

RESULTS

Doing more with less thanks to AI-driven automation

By implementing three of Esker’s automation solutions, Palmer Holland has seen transformation benefits that are contributing to significant time savings and helping to propel company growth. After automating customer inquiries, routing emails now only takes four hours a week, as opposed to four hours a day. This can be attributed to the fact that Esker’s quick-learning AI Engine is classifying inquiries correctly over 90% of the time.

Esker’s AI recognition has been a highly valuable player for order management as well. Almost all need for manual intervention has been eliminated, as 96.8% of orders are identified correctly by the solution. Palmer Holland has also begun auto-processing orders for several customers and is looking to enable auto-processing for a much larger subset of customers in the future.

As for collections management, the online portal has allowed Palmer Holland’s customers to become more self-sufficient. In fact, the company has processed approximately $1 million in self-service payments. Now that customers can pay and ask questions online, the Collections Specialist has more time to focus on higher-value tasks. The reporting capabilities of Esker’s Collections Management solution provide greater insights into receivables data and have led to significant time savings, as creating a report would require hours of research and data collection prior to automation. And even as the company grows, still only one full-time employee is needed to handle all collections.

Additionally, Esker’s intuitive interface allows for easy onboarding of new CSRs or other team members, and simplifies training for customer inquiries management.

"We have a monthly meeting to discuss collections activity on certain key accounts, and Esker’s ability to instantly pull that information for our reports has been a game changer for us. It’s all right there."
Amber Twarek | Credit Manager, Palmer Holland