New challenges and opportunities for household bills in the Work from Anywhere era

With the advent of the Work from Anywhere era, and the explosive growth of the gig economy, households have become a workplace as well as a life space. Calvi’s marketing expert, Laura Broers explores the implications of these trends on telecoms bills.

The household is changing. More people are working from home and using a wider range of business-oriented ICT (Information Communications Technology) services as a result. At the same time, the composition of the household is changing, with more shared accommodation and more young adults remaining at home households now often have multiple bill payers and a need to share and assign costs. CSPs have an opportunity to help households and businesses navigate these changes and make it easier for them to manage, control, and pay their telecoms costs.

The household has become a workspace

During the Covid-19 pandemic, large numbers of people began working from home. They enjoyed it so much that when faced with a return to the office many preferred to quit and change their lifestyle completely in a phenomenon that became known as The Great Resignation. In September 2021 alone, 4.4 million US workers quit their jobs, with a significant proportion joining the gig economy, working freelance or setting up micro-businesses, and most opting to work remotely.

The speed and scale of change is unprecedented in labor history. In the US, 16% of the workforce now participates in the gig economy either full or part-time, while in Europe, 28 million people work via gig economy platforms. Micro-businesses are also flourishing, with GoDaddy reporting that an additional 2.8 million online micro-businesses were created in the US in 2020 compared to 2019, meaning that nearly 17% of the 20 million US micro-businesses started after the onset of the pandemic. The number of skilled freelancers working from home is also increasing. According to the Freelance Forward report from Upwork, 51% of US workers with postgraduate degrees are now freelancers. These workers are providing a wide range of skilled services to US businesses such as computer programming, marketing, IT, and consulting, which requires them to use a far wider range of ICT services and presents an opportunity for CSPs.

CSPs have been quick to address these opportunities – offering new types of household bundles that straddle the B2C-B2B divide and providing additional services beyond connectivity. Industry analysts Omnisperience have called this type of offer Connected Customer Assurance & Protection Services (CCAPS) which (among other things) incorporate WiFi optimization, network-based security, CPE security, and parental and business controls.

As CSPs begin providing an increased range of services to households, here are four key billing issues they need to think about:

1. A single bill is convenient but has to be designed to avoid confusion
   Family packages that include a bundle of devices, shared data services and incorporate both landline and mobile offerings provide an incentive for households to consolidate their spending. Many CSPs are now adding services such as security and collaboration tools - taking bundles well beyond the realms of quad-play. However, all of this has consequences for bills. While households may still prefer a single bill for all services they receive, in order to capture customer value and avoid unnecessary frustration, it’s vital that CSPs communicate the cost of these complex bundles in a clear, transparent and proactive manner.
2. Qualifying the household as a place of business and promoting additional services
   CSPs are increasingly offering business packages to support gig economy workers, freelancers and micro-businesses. CSPs such as Vodafone, BT and Virgin-O2 have even created new business units to drive this opportunity further. As a recurring monthly touchpoint, the bill can be used to inform customers of new relevant services and bundled offers. Billing data can also provide insights into households where people regularly work from home and the type of service they would most benefit from – enabling more accurate recommendations to be made and boosting the effectiveness of cross-selling.
3. Separation of the user and the payer
   Historically, the household bill payer and service user were one and the same, but this is no longer necessarily the case. Enterprises, for example, might pay for some household services directly (such as broadband). However, where the payer is the enterprise, it’s important that the account holder should still be the householder (the domiciled individual) so that if there’s a problem, they can resolve it directly with the CSP and the CSP can remain GDPR compliant.
4. Helping householders more easily assign costs
   With the change in composition of the household, an increasing number of households may have multiple adult residents who are responsible for part of the bill. There are already mobile applications that enable people to easily share the cost of paying for expenses (eg Split wise and Settle Up), but CSPs have a real opportunity to make it easier for households to process and assign costs within a household, addressing an emerging customer needs. Reducing the effort involved in helping households account for, and assign costs is in the CSP’s own interest because it means bills will get paid faster – speeding their cash flow. Although this might seem like a very difficult or unusual thing to do, CSPs have had functionality to support cost assignment, cost analysis etc on the B2B side of their business for a long time – they just need to apply this know-how within the household.

As the household continues to evolve and its needs change, CSPs have an opportunity to support emerging needs using their bill know-how. The household is becoming a shared B2B-B2C space and leveraging billing knowledge from both B2C and B2B divisions will enable them to innovate their offering, support customer need, drive loyalty and discover new value. 

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