3 ways to innovate your billing experience and the benefits you'll unlock by doing so

Innovation is one of the biggest buzzwords in the telecoms industry. Every CSP wants to be innovative, but what does innovation mean when applied to billing? Bill Specialist Rob Vos explains why innovating the billing experience is so important for customer satisfaction and retention.

There are three main forms of bill innovation: CSPs can innovate the experience delivered to their customers, the commercial role of the bill, or the technologies that support billing. In this blog, we consider the first of these – the impact the bill has on the customer journey, and how CSPs enhance customer experience by focusing on their bills.

Why innovate the billing experience?

In most CSPs the bill has seen less investment and less innovation than  many other areas, even though improving the billing experience (BX) is proven to yield a wide range of benefits. This is a serious oversight because the bill is the primary touchpoint and engagement mechanism for mid-lifecycle customers. Therefore, innovating the billing experience is a tangible way to make customers feel and perceive innovation in the overall service being provided.

Here are three key ways in which CSPs can innovate the billing experience being provided. 

1. Let the customer define their billing experience

At a very basic level, improving the billing experience means making sure it's clear and understandable for all stakeholders. This is highly subjective, because consumers, businesses and individual employees all differ immensely in terms of their needs. Currently, CSPs are working hard to tailor and personalize many other aspects of experience to customers’ needs, but bills remain largely generic, meaning that customers still can’t choose what they get, how they get it or when they get it.

This is frustrating for all customers, but for business customers in particular it is costly as well as frustrating. It means the contract manager can’t easily check prices, the controller can’t easily allocate costs and the asset manager can’t easily track changes. This increases the effort required to process bills, and lengthens the time to payment.

What can CSPs do?

There are a number of ways to tailor information to customers’ needs. Making the bill more relevant means CSPs are not wasting their customers’ time on details that don't matter to them. They can do this quite easily by offering customers predefined templates that allow them to choose the level of detail they want in their bills. For B2B customers, tailoring the information to individual stakeholders’ needs is vital to reduce the effort required to process bills – delivering a better experience for employees, lowering the cost and effort of processing bills, and ultimately ensuring that CSPs get paid on time.

2. A picture is worth a thousand words

Our brains are designed for visual processing, not text. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text simply because that’s what people are used to. An MIT study found that the brain can process an image in less than 13ms. Another study found that combining relevant information with text increases how much customers remember by 650%. Color further boosts retention and attention – with 80% of people more willing to read information that’s in color.

In contrast, most bills consist of endless black and white lines of products, dates, and costs, which makes it hard for customers to read the information and isolate insight that’s meaningful to them.

What can CSPs do?

CSPs can isolate and illustrate important or interesting information and convey this using diagrams and pictures to help the customer understand. For example, showing how much the customer has spent over the last six months in a diagrammatic format allows the customer to quickly assess if this month’s charges are normal or anomalous, as well as if they’re spending more than they think they should on a regular basis. Once the CSP has caught the customer’s attention, they can then explain to the customer what actions they could take – such as how they can make their spending more predictable by upgrading to an alternative offer or product or identifying why this month’s bill is so high (avoiding the need for the customer to call their account manager or support center). A smart combination of text and visuals can transform the bill from a boring, time-consuming, and frustrating chore into a useful tool to monitor consumption.

3. Add new channels

Customers favor different channels to receive information, which means communicating billing information in customers' channels of choice is a crucial way to innovate the billing experience.

What can CSPs do?

• Sending short messages via text, email, or WhatsApp can alert individuals that their bill is ready, summarize any important information, or ask for payment. This is useful for consumers and employees as it saves them time by letting them know, for example, that there’s nothing in this month’s bill that needs their attention, because all charges are within their bundle.
• Providing audio billing addresses inclusivity issues, because it helps customers who have literacy problems or who are visually impaired.
• Delivering billing information via a mobile app can appeal to both B2C and SME customers, removing the need for them to log in to a website.
• Larger businesses might value the delivery of electronic invoices via a specific method, such as PEPPOL. In many EU countries, the delivery of invoices via PEPPOL has even become mandatory, for invoices sent to government-owned institutions.

There are many ways in which CSPs can innovate the billing experience of their customers. To be successful, they have to flip their perspective on bills – seeing them from the customer's point of view and understanding what customers need from their bills. Providing a better billing experience not only reduces customer frustration and calls to support, but will eventually help to build the trust required for a long and profitable relationship.

Curious how you can improve or innovate your billing experience and unlock the full potential of your bill? Click here or contact us today and chat with one of our specialists!

Contact