Just as Covid-19 accelerated digitalization, the cost-of-living crisis is accelerating the need for personalization. Laura Broers looks at why this is the case and how it affects the bill.
The days of one-size fits all experiences are history. In State of the Connected Customer 2022, Salesforce found that 88% of customers believe experience matters as much as a product; 73% expect businesses to understand their unique and individual needs; and 52% expect all offers to be personalized.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Personalization follows digitalization as night follows day, so, logically, customers should expect personalization to be one of the benefits accruing from the acceleration of digitalization during the Covid-19 crisis. But what’s different is customers’ expectations of personalization itself.
Where customers might once have been satisfied with a relatively shallow level of personalization (such as having their name on correspondence), both consumers and businesses now expect:
Billing has traditionally taken a one-size-fits-all approach. Standardization was regarded as more important than personalization. While some larger enterprise clients benefited from limited tailoring, most customers’ bills had the same look-and-feel, format, language, tone of voice, and information, which helped service providers keep costs down while fulfilling their legal and regulatory duties.
But the cost-of-living crisis means bills are being scrutinized as never before. This provides an unprecedented incentive for service providers to rethink their billing experience and take a more tailored approach to support customers’ needs more precisely.
Key enablers are already in place. Access to high-quality data fuels the ability to tailor the bill experience. The move to digital bills makes it easier and cheaper to adapt bills to the needs of individual customers. And finally, a focus on customer experience can make bills easier to use and less effort to process.
Here are three ways service providers can utilize personalization that are particularly useful during the current cost-of-living crisis.
Clearly communicating any changes that affect the customer - such as increases in their monthly subscription or the end of a special offer - is vital to avoid confusion and the inevitable call to the contact center. Likewise, one-off, pro-rated, or overage charges specific to the customer can be highlighted, with an explanation provided or a reminder as to why these costs were incurred. A tailored video ‘bill’ can be very useful to communicate how to use new or unused features that might be helpful to customers watching their costs – such as the ability to set up cost controls, alerts, and notifications – as well as to explain common FAQs at key points in the customer journey (such as why a first bill is different to what might be expected). The bill not only provides a great opportunity to reinforce the value being provided to an individual customer, but service providers can even go a step further and become more proactive – suggesting to financially stressed customers, for example, how they could save money by moving to a more appropriate tariff.
A Europe-wide study by EY recently discovered that 44% of customers think their service provider doesn’t ensure they’re on the best possible deal. Customers were also frustrated by overly-complex offers that made it difficult for them to make decisions and compare value. Interestingly, the 18-24 cohort were the most confused by service provider offers, with 39% saying value propositions were hard to understand compared to 34% of those over 66. This indicates how useful billing data can be in enabling service providers to compare actual usage against available offers, bundles, and plans to ensure customers are on the right deal for their needs; or to create personalized recommendations and offers.
In the past, dunning was a one-size-fits-all process conducted by a separate team that reported to the CFO. There was very little integration with billing teams, which typically report to the IT Director or CTO. However, as dunning becomes softer, more customer- and solution-oriented, there’s a significant opportunity to make the process smarter and more tailored. This means using billing data to detect early changes in payment or usage behavior and personalizing support and available options for stressed customers. Understanding the customer lifetime value (CLV) means dunning teams can make smarter choices about the following best action to take - balancing customers’ needs with assuring a steady cash flow for the service provider.
Customers expect their bills to be personalized to their needs and the help offered to them if they get into financial difficulties. Service providers can utilize their billing data to tailor bills to customer needs, reinforce their perception of value, identify and promote relevant offers, and implement smarter dunning processes.
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.
