What is BX and why should I want to improve it?

Billing experience (BX) is one of the most critical and overlooked components of customer experience. Improving your BX performance can significantly enhance key customer, commercial and operational performance metrics. Laura Broers explains how.

Profitable business strategies are usually built on differentiation. Most communication service providers (CSPs) currently focus on specific parts of their offering as a means of differentiation – such as pricing or products – which means that they are competing on the exact same things, resulting in fast commoditization of any offer or innovation delivered.

Instead, CSPs need to optimize and innovate less obvious areas of experience, in a way that customers value but their competitors don’t offer.

This touches on a frequently ignored truism of customer experience (CX): CX is only as good as the weakest link in the customer journey. CSPs can be great at most areas of CX, but let down by their performance in a single key area. Unfortunately, this one suboptimal area of experience will negatively impact customers’ perception of their entire brand and the services they provide, no matter how good they are at everything else.

Therefore, optimizing CX requires CSPs to understand the contribution of each touchpoint and component of experience - ensuring it is intentionally-designed and performing as expected. CSPs should also have a clear view of how components work together, and impact one another, in order to deliver that all-important market-leading CX performance.

The four components of telecoms customer experience

Why should I want to improve my BX?

Bills lie at the very heart of the commercial relationship with the customer. The first bill is a vital step in setting the tone of the entire customer relationship. Subsequent bills are the most frequent touchpoints CSPs have with their mid-lifecycle customers. But bills are also the biggest cause of customer frustration and the number 1 driver of contact center traffic.

The full impact of a suboptimal billing experience (BX) – what customers perceive and feel when they receive a bill or invoice – is often not fully appreciated. Departmentalization and siloed operations mean that many service providers do not understand just how much a negative billing experience is impacting across their own organization or on the CX being delivered. This is because BX is usually treated as a standalone process, disconnected from wider CX goals and strategies. As a result, bills have become CX blackspots that negatively impact how customers feel about their CSPs, with a subsequent knock-on effect on internal CSP operational and commercial goals.

As such, innovating BX offers a unique opportunity to significantly improve the overall business performance being delivered, as well as providing a powerful point of differentiation. And the good news is that improving BX not only delivers a wide range of positive impacts across the organization, but can be improved quickly and cost-effectively without the need to undergo an entire billing transformation.

BX innovation is thus a key strategy for savvy, customer-centric CSPs who wish to improve their CSAT and NPS scores, reduce their churn rates, build trusted relationships leading to upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and minimize the number of frustrated customers calling their contact centers.

The impact of better billing experience

We believe the billing experience should be viewed as an integral element of the customer journey. This means that all billing touchpoints and communications should be optimized to ensure they are relevant, adapted to a customer’s situation and personal preferences, and aimed at helping customers understand and pay their bills as quickly as possible. When these objectives have been met, the bill has successfully served its purpose.

To find out how Calvi can help innovate your BX, contact us!