Four ways AI is transforming bills

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.

The telecoms industry is rapidly adopting generative AI to transform its operational efficiency, customer interactions, and commercial outcomes. For example, a recent study by AWS found that 48% of service providers intended to adopt AI into their operational processes in the next two years, and spending will increase 6-fold. Participating service providers emphasized using generative AI to enhance customer centricity, deliver better experiences, and reduce operational costs. In the billing domain, generative AI offers a range of efficiency and customer experience enhancements. Let’s look at four of these. 

Making bills more personalized

Generative AI delivers the capabilities to tailor bills to the needs of individual customers in a way that wasn’t previously possible. It is able to display the information according to customer preferences and choose which data to highlight to meet a customer’s specific needs. This level of hyper-personalization depends on having accurate and complete data to fuel it; therefore, it is the most data-capable service providers that will seek to utilize this capability first. They will be able to transform their bills into smart, hyper-personalized communication tools that are both informative and far easier to process and pay – differentiating themselves from their competitors and delivering a superior customer experience.

Transforming customer support

Billing is a major cause of call center traffic, with typically up to 40% of calls related to billing and payment issues. Channels such as phone, chat, and email cost an average of .01 per interaction to handle, according to Gartner, and the more complex the inquiry, the higher the cost of handling it. Reducing the confusion around bills is one method of minimizing customer support costs, and here, generative AI plays a role in presenting information in a way that makes sense to customers. But encouraging more customers to use automated support channels – whether that’s self-service or chatbots – is a major strategy for service providers seeking to minimize their operational costs. 

Smarter chatbots and self-service apps can easily handle most bill-related inquiries such as minimum term, questions about charges, payment handling, requesting a fee is removed, updating personal or financial information, or changing bill payment due dates.

Conversational AI chatbots can even deal with these inquiries while the customer attempts to call the contact center. For example, if a customer is queuing to query an overage charge, AI can analyze their latest bill, detect the charge, and ask if that’s the issue. It can then suggest options to the customer to resolve the issue before they speak to a human operative. This not only reduces queue times but also costs.  

Suppose the customer’s issue is particularly complex. In that case, they may still need to talk to a human. Still, even here, AI can ensure the service representative is prepped and able to handle the call quickly and effectively by providing they have all the customer history in front of them with any likely issues flagged up and next-best actions suggested. 

These scenarios are possible today, but all require easy access to customer billing data to deliver them.

Delivering greater insight and speeding payments

Every business has a group of late payers – some are going through a particular financial issue and need short-term help, but others are consistently late payers. 

AI can mine customer data to understand customer context and recommend the next best actions for individual customers. When there is a change in customer behavior – for example, a prompt payer makes a couple of late payments – AI can automatically flag up the issue, analyze the risk of further late payments, suggest payment strategies, and proactively reach out to the customer through their channel of choice. 

Service providers can use AI to transform slow payers into prompt payers by making dunning processes far smarter. Automated, friendly communications can be sent as the due date approaches, with options suggested for those genuinely struggling, plus reminders of how to ask for assistance and likely penalty fees if the bill remains unpaid. The algorithm will not only learn the patterns of late payment and be able to identify more effective strategies to encourage prompt payment, but will also tailor the approach according to company policy and strategy, as well as the characteristics of the individual customer. 

This smarter dunning process is aimed at keeping customers engaged, adapting to their changing circumstances, and maximizing customer lifetime value while at the same time minimizing operational costs. For more information on smart dunning see here.

Finding new value

Billing data is precious to understand customers’ needs and wants. This data can be mined and matched against current offers and promotions to make marketing and sales far more targetted and effective. Customers at risk of churn can be detected, and proactive retention options are suggested. And the bill itself becomes a valuable piece of collateral to explain new products or offers that might be relevant to a customer, to reinforce the value being delivered, to mark important milestones (“This is your fifth anniversary with us, so we’ve added some extra credit as a thank you”), to educate customers and remind them of important information. 

Billing data can also be used to design new products, promotions, and customer retention strategies.

Opening the silos

So, what’s holding service providers back from accessing all these benefits to their business? As always, access to good quality data is often still trapped in legacy billing silos and designed to be used for one purpose only – supplying a legacy bill. Many billing vendors are now adding AI to deliver the capabilities mentioned in this article, meaning their customers can immediately benefit from them. But the reality is that few service providers have consolidated business support systems (BSS) and are unlikely to replace or consolidate their systems immediately, meaning that only a subset of data is available to these platforms. 

Service providers with multiple legacy systems could embark on a multi-year digital transformation program but in this case, will have to wait to receive the benefits. Or they could immediately open existing billing silos without having to replace them to gain access to the valuable data they contain at minimal cost and disruption. 

And this is exactly where Calvi comes in. Find out how our platform brings together data from your billing systems into one place, and our APIs provide easy access to this data to fuel any AI initiative you have in mind. Interested in more information? Contact us here.