Lessons from Lego – creating the building blocks of more personalized bill experiences

As 5G rolls out, CSPs experiment with new models & offers, and customer needs & expectations change, Rob Vos looks at how a simple children’s toy could be an inspiration for the future bill experience.

Most communication service providers (CSPs) want to improve the way they meet the needs of their customers. After all, the benefits of doing so are well understood. But the question is how can they do this quickly and cost-effectively?

Meeting customer needs starts with understanding the customer and here the traditional attempts at market segmentation have sometimes stood in the way. Historic segments were large and inexact, pushing a rigid ‘one size fits no-one’ bill experience to customers. The cure CSPs applied, however, was sometimes worse than the disease - they simply created more segments, resulting in greater complexity that had to be managed and supported.

Bills likewise focused on granular usage of products – even if inappropriate - and were not tailored to the role or needs of the customer, the systems receiving the bill, or the stage of the customer relationship.

Expectations of billing is changing rapidly. Younger customers increasingly want to order, configure and control their own services, and expect CSPs to provide the tools they need to do so. According to Zendesk’s ‘Customer Experience Trends Report 2021’, for example, Gen Z customers are 50% more likely to use self-service options than Gen X customers and 150% more likely than those over 55. These changes in behavior and attitude affect not only the consumer market, but also the business market, as Gen Z enters the workforce and become the decision makers.

This report also found that many customers described a common complaint about bills - ‘not being able to find the information I need’ - as one of the most frustrating aspects of bad customer service. Even here there was a generational difference, with a third of Generation Z respondents citing this as extremely irritating compared to just 18% of customers aged over 55.

But how can CSPs provide a sticky, personalized experience without running the risk of not being able to maintain or support it? In fact, they can do this by taking their inspiration from a classic children’s toy.

Taking the Lego approach

Lego is popular with children and adults precisely because it enables them to create amazing structures from simple, standard and colorful building blocks.   

A similar approach could be utilized for future bills – helping CSPs to avoid the problems associated with trying to second-guess what customers want by providing defaults and best practice presets. B2B Customers can then personalize their billing experience further by adding or removing blocks of information, with some features available for free and others as payable options.

This approach not only meets the needs of individual customers more precisely, or the role they have within their company, but creates a more engaged and sticky experience because customers themselves have invested time and effort into tailoring their own bill experience.

Such an approach enables standard ‘blocks’ of functions to be provided. These might include a library of notification templates, different types of bill formats, e-invoice formats and bill delivery methods. The customer can then add, adapt or remove these at will to create a fully personalized experience without hiking costs or making bills unmanageably complex.

The Calvi Insight portal already uses this type of Lego approach, allowing customers to configure their own dashboard to see just the reports that are relevant to them, and enabling them to create their own tailored bill experience.

CSPs need to take account of the emerging needs for self-care, self-configuration and self-personalization. Taking a ‘building blocks’ approach to bill experience design provides a wide range of benefits, including more exact personalization, a better and ‘stickier’ experience, and the reduction of confusion. All of which can be delivered in a cost-effective and scalable manner

To learn more about our vision, contact our billing specialist Rob Vos! 

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