Transition from cheques to Electronic transfers for reseller payments

The problem

Every time a Canadian Agricultural company issued marketing program rebate cheques the team spent several hours reissuing them. The reason was due to returned cheques with incorrect addresses or stale-dated cheques. While correcting addresses could help with lost cheques it wouldn't address the stale-dated cheques problem.

The research process

Given the company has a global presence, the first step was to talk to the program team in the U.S. Based on this I learned they implemented electronic payments for resellers a year ago. This discovery also helped to know that the current custom software the company used for payments could support electronic transfers.
As the next step I ran a survey with resellers based on which we discovered they would love to receive electronic payments.
Next I prepared a proposal to present it to the sales district managers and evaluate their support to implement electronic payments. Unfortunately they were not convinced to support the idea given they valued the opportunity for the sales reps to deliver the cheques in person and they had concerns with the company collecting financial information from customers.

The prototype

I met with the software company that built the custom software to evaluate if it would be possible to issue more than one payment run using different methods. They confirmed the company could issue payments using cheques and electronic payments interchangeably. I also confirmed that we could set up accounts for electronic payments whenever they were ready to provide their information. Next I Interviewed sales reps to ask if they knew of resellers that could be interested to participate in a pilot. I was able to recruit ten companies to participate in the pilot and before implementation they provided feedback on potential concerns such as receive their program statement and receive notifications about payments via email.
The pilot was a success as it allowed me to discover how to collect financial information from companies while making them feel comfortable about it, identify what information and processes was needed to transition resellers to electronic payments comfortably and get the buy-in from the Regional sales managers as we were able to select what payments the sales reps should deliver via cheques in person.

The solution

The next year I was able to add the electronic payment feature in the custom software and broadly promote the option to resellers to sign up for electronic payments. This solution increased program participation, and improved customer and employee experience by significantly reducing the amount of returned and stale-dated cheques.