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AFB Diversified
Forrester recently released a survey indicating that by 2012 online
bill payment will surpass direct billing for the first time. From this
we can deduce that the online billing market is growing rapidly. Are you
growing with it or are you being left in the dust?
(http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20141)
In another recent study by Aspen Analytics, it was found that customers
that pay their bills online were 76% less likely to leave their bank. It
only makes sense that those customers are also less likely to leave
their service providers and utility companies that offer eBilling
solutions.
What does this mean to the average utility company or service provider?
It means that your online billing solution choice is going to become
even more of a differentiator as eBilling becomes the normal business
practice for bill payment. In other words, simply having an eBilling
solution will no longer be enough to differentiate your company. If you
choose a cheap, difficult to use eBilling solution, you are likely to be
left in the wake of your competition. It is time to start looking for a
quality solution that fully meets your customers’ needs; before your
competition does.
In the study by Aspen Analytics, they found that companies that pay
their bills online are over 15% more profitable than those who pay using
traditional direct billing. How does bill payment affect overall
profitability? Online bill payment adds efficiency to bill payment and
companies are far more likely to pay their bills on time or early,
therefore, avoiding fees, if they pay online. So, by simply providing an
eBilling option to your customers, you are promoting their long term
success and their ability to be a long term customer.
Today’s top of the line solutions provide both eBilling and analysis
functionality. By providing one of the more robust eBilling solutions
that offer both eBilling and analytics, that percentage of increased
profitability is more than likely going to rise to a much higher number.
Bill analysis solutions allow customers to easily and efficiently
allocate expenses and review trending reports that can lead to higher
efficiency in business processes; allowing companies to identify areas
for improvement.
Many businesses are utilizing the bill management systems offered by
their service providers to enhance efficiency and improve resource
management. Businesses are also using the automated analytics tools
offered by many service providers to do their allocation management and
trend reporting for them – rather than having an internal resource
dedicated to that activity. Long gone are the days of 200 page paper
bills and spreadsheet analysis. More robust tools are now available.
Many of these programs provide feature rich functionality that empowers
business customers from large SMEs to multi-national businesses to
produce the reports they need to conduct business, increasing customer
satisfaction. Some of these programs even provide sophisticated levels
of functionality that allow users to design customized reports that can
be stored and run on demand. Reports are quickly generated and can be
easily exported for distribution or use in other packages. Structures,
reflecting that of the organization, enable users to allocate costs
easily to account codes. The ability to allow the individual user to
identify their personal and business costs is also available in many of
the top of the line eBilling solutions.
In the process of providing your customers with a solution that can help
them to be more efficient in analyzing and allocating their bills, you
will also be helping them to become more profitable overall. Considering
the added customer loyalty that comes with providing eBilling and now
the increased profitability that your advanced eBilling system will
afford them, they are likely to be your customers for a very long time. |
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