As the cost-of-living crisis deepens, customers of all kinds are struggling with rising costs. There’s never been a more important time to ensure bills are clear, helpful and personalized according to Calvi’s Laura Broers.
Inflationary pressures are showing few signs of letting up. The European Central Bank forecasts that inflation will remain high throughout 2023. High inflation and uncertainty is weakening consumer confidence and consumers’ ability to pay on time, with knock-on effects to the business community.
While the telecoms sector is viewed as an essential service and fairly robust when it comes to this type of downturn, it’s not entirely immune to these effects.
According to a Europe-wide study conducted by Intrum, for example, 8 in 10 consumers are now worried about rising costs, 58% say this is having a detrimental effect on their well-being, and 6 in 10 say they have already changed their spending habits as a result. The same study also found that a quarter of European customers are likely to skip paying their broadband (24%) and telephone (23%) bills in the next 12 months. Worryingly, these were the second and third most likely bills customers would default on.
This presents a difficult challenge to CSPs who face rising power and labor costs and are midway through ambitious network rollouts with hundreds of millions of euros already committed to full fiber and 5G. Inflation is not only putting pressure on them to raise their own prices but is limiting their ability to fully exploit premium network propositions.
In fact, EY has named CSPs’ response to the cost-of-living crisis as the biggest risk factor they currently face. It points to a recent study it conducted, which revealed 60% of customers are fearful of rising broadband costs and 44% don’t think their broadband provider is doing enough to direct them to the best deal.
EY comments that regulators are increasingly demanding CSPs to do more to improve affordability, with the company’s Adrian Baschnonga noting that customers often find pricing confusing and “difficult to interpret”, making it hard for them to work out where the value lies.
So how can bills help with these challenges? In fact, well-designed bills can help CSPs navigate the cost-of-living crisis more effectively in 3 key ways.
It’s never been more important for CSPs to ensure their bills are clear and easy to understand or to take a personalized approach to communication within the bill. Making better use of the bill as an adaptive communication tool that helps them stay engaged with their customers, while offering options and suggestions, and reinforcing the value being delivered, is both tactical in terms of navigating the immediate crisis and strategic in terms of building stronger relationships that position CSPs ready for the upturn.
Laura Broers is Calvi’s Marketing and Communications Specialist, joining Calvi after completing a degree in communications. With her passion for improving the billing experience, Laura is great at putting herself in the customers’ shoes to help CSPs think about how they can improve their billing communications.
As service providers rapidly adopt AI to transform their operations and customer interactions, Calvi looks at the benefits they can derive from applying the technology to their bills and billing data. In the billing domain, generative AI offers a range of efficiency and customer experience enhancements. Let’s look at four of these.
Service providers are investing heavily in AI, but the success of these investments relies on having access to the right data. In telecoms, billing is one of the most important customer data sources. Find out why mastering billing data is a critical step in optimizing the success of AI, as well as the three main ways AI + billing data can be utilized.
15% of the global population has some form of disability, including visual, auditory, or cognitive disabilities. In many countries, it’s now a legal requirement to ensure that people with disabilities can access the information they need.
