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Operators sending paper bills to customers will soon be out of business. Today’s competitive pressures demand cost reductions at every opportunity to stay in business and killing the paper bill, for this purpose, is now classed as a “no-brainer”.
What is not understood is why, historically, this obvious process has had such pathetic adoption. After 10 years, some companies are talking about “successfully” achieving 20 percent paper turn-off, while others are claiming 30 percent in nine months – what’s the secret?
The Paper Bill is Dead – Long Live the E-Bill! Customer communication is a fundamental element of the business cycle. A regular statement or bill is a key touch point for a business. As the use of the Internet and in particular email has become mainstream, migrating the delivery of paper bills into an electronic format is a logical and expected evolution.
Building a business case for e-billing is a simple process. With global competitive pressures, organizations can ill afford not to invest in a new process that has these very tangible benefits: * Cuts print and postage costs by up to 85 percent * Improves cash flow * Boosts brand * Enhances the customer experience * Preserves the environment * The Secret’s in the Model * Historically, e-billing started with bills being made available on websites. Today, many organizations still present bills to the customer via a website - either their own or that of a consolidator who aggregates bills from various billers. Companies in the U.S. have successfully pushed this aging model, but more and more companies, particularly in regions outside the U.S., are now securely delivering the bills by email. So the question arises – do you ‘push’ the bill to your customer via email or ‘pull’ them to a website? Or, better still, do you combine the processes and do both?
Push vs. Pull The answer to this question ultimately depends on the nature of the customer base, as well as how savvy customers are in using the online channel, according to Bruce Cundiff, senior analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research in Pleasanton, Calif.
Customers are looking to the online environment to make their lives more convenient. However customers are used to having their bills delivered to them and are therefore reluctant to collect them from a website. Further barriers to adoption include complex registration processes and yet another ID/password to remember.
Therefore, customer adoption and the resulting paper turn-off rates for the online bill presentation model have been low – generally around 10 - 20 percent even after many years. The ‘pull’ model is not becoming the preferred e-billing model for companies who are striving to achieve significant adoption and paper turn-off rates.
Companies who support a ‘pull’ only model are not able to enjoy the cost and environmental benefits associated with significant adoption of the paperless environment.
By contrast, the ‘push’ model presents the bill as a securely encrypted email attachment, allowing the customer to authorize payment via a pay button embedded in the bill itself, which is a far more convenient and secure option. No registration is required – just an email address – and it takes only two clicks to view and pay a bill in this way, compared to around seven clicks for a web-based ‘pull’ solution.
This offers the path of least resistance for customers and drives customer adoption and significant paper turn-off. The electronic documents can be made to look identical to the original paper document, thus minimizing customer resistance to change. Highly targeted, trackable marketing within the e-bills drives qualified traffic to the biller’s website or elsewhere if this valuable real-estate is sold to third-party companies.
‘Push’ Processes Achieve High Adoption ‘Push’ processes have the highest success rate in gaining user adoption around the world; recently IREA, a company in the U.S., achieved 27 percent paper turn-off in just nine months. ‘Push’ complements self-service website ‘pull’ processes, giving customers the flexibility and choice of process that suits them best.
It’s not just about technology. With an e-billing platform, you can’t just ‘build it and they will come’. Specialist companies, like Striata, have spent more than a decade testing consumer behavior, with specific emphasis and expertise in the high volume delivery of secure, electronic documents. This experience has resulted in methodologies that achieve the highest consumer adoption rates worldwide.
The Future is Customer Convenience So where is this all going? Web-based solutions that allow customers to log in and view historical bills are a major part of any telco’s customer service platform and are here to stay. Turning off paper bills for the masses requires a new approach and a new type of e-bill; something that actually adds value and convenience to the customer and isn’t just a cost-saving measure dressed up as a “green” initiative.
The answer for “Kill the Bill” is secure e-bills delivered to the inbox via email, complete with built-in payment and customer update forms, embedded Excel files of call details that can be downloaded and analyzed further, Flash functionality allowing “on-the-fly” sorting and creation of usage graphs, personalized marketing that is truly relevant and one-click payment from within the email body itself. Creativity is the only limiting factor!
Keith Russell is Sales Director - Asia Pacific for Striata , a global company specializing in ‘push’ e-billing. |
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