n a co-creation world, customer centricity is key to designing products and services that precisely meet customer needs. But what if all this positive energy results in an incomprehensible and frustrating bill experience?
In the co-creation economy, B2B customers don’t think in terms of single, generic products they buy from individual suppliers. They want solutions that will make their lives easier, fit today’s workforce, and help them make more money. They therefore look for business partners that can combine and tailor products into solutions that meet their needs more precisely.
For the customer, this desire may sound straightforward, but for the co-creation partner the solution is far from simple. Meeting the customer’s need requires them to seamlessly integrate with several partners who provide part of the overall solution.
Importantly, the customer’s need for simplicity has to be reflected in each month’s bill which must be fully convergent and easy to understand and process - reflecting the customer’s perception of the service and not the supplier’s.
However, supplier(s) tend to create bills by itemizing separate products that make up the solution the customer is using. This approach is straightforward from the supplier’s perspective, but it presents three major challenges for customers:
So, while the customer may enjoy the solution being provided, they could end up hating the process of having to pay for it, because for them this aspect of the solution is time-consuming, costly and confusing. Ultimately, this means they may become less enthusiastic about co-creating solutions and less loyal – looking for a solution provider who is easier to deal with commercially. They may even become vocal about their frustrations, adding to customer support costs.
But suppliers can easily avoid this situation with a bit of careful planning and thought.
A better way of producing a bill for co-created solutions is to take a more customer-centric approach or, simply put, to also co-create the bill experience.
Let’s look at an example.
Many CSPs deliver Workplace services to their customers today. This involves the CSP bundling core connectivity services (mobile, fixed and internet) with third-party products such as unified communications, Office 365, security solutions, a VPN, IoT solutions and support services. Customers benefit by having one partner to deal with instead of ten, which makes managing the relationship easier. However, this is an example of traditional partner relationships and bundling, not co-creation. Taking this a step further, however, customers should be able to select and tailor their own Workplace solution to meet their needs more precisely. This puts the customer in the driving seat and is an example of co-creation.
From a billing perspective, customers don’t care about the separate products that make up the solution they have created with their CSP. They certainly don’t want bills that reflect the complex mix of products involved in their solution.
What they actually want is a bill that reflects their own experience – the solution they purchased and how they used it. They may want a simple overview that shows the number of ‘Workplaces’ they used that month, or they may like charges to be broken down by type, department or location. Additional information – such as how to reduce their costs, or updates on new productivity elements that can be added to their existing Workplace solution – might also be interesting to them.
The most important thing is that the bill makes sense to the customer. If the biller pushes the effort onto the customer – expecting them to perform a complex translation of their own experience into the products that supported it – then it will result in confusion, frustration and slower payment. The information must be designed to help the customer save time, money and effort rather than simply reflecting the product lines of the CSP and its partners.
Ideally, companies go one step further and give their customers the ability to tailor their bills to their own needs, extending co-creation even into the commercial experience. This isn’t hard to do – it’s something that can easily be achieved today using Calvi’s Adaptive Design for electronic bill presentment.
In conclusion, if sufficient attention is not paid to bills, the risk is that the effort of processing them will undermine co-creation initiatives – making customers less likely to experiment with additional solutions. Instead, CSPs need to ensure that bills are customer-centric and simple for the customer to understand. This will encourage customers to pay promptly and keep using the solution. Getting bills right will boost take-up, lead to repeat business, and help engage customers in the co-creation process.
To find out more about what co-creation means in terms of bills and billing, why not contact one of our business consultants to learn more about this topic.
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