For the better part of a decade, billers and financial institutions have been trying to get customers to agree to turn off their paper document and fetch it at their self-serve portal or internet banking website.
At the same time, those very same billers have been strongly advocating electronic payment.
Here are some high level statistics as of mid 2012:
- Approximately 65% of all consumer payments in the United States today are electronic.
- Approximately 6% of consumer bills, statements, insurance policies and other documents have been turned off.
It’s hard to believe that electronic payments can be such a spectacular success, yet paper suppression is a complete and dismal failure.
The bottom line: If you require your customers to visit your website, register, choose and remember usernames and passwords; your paper suppression will plateau at well below 25% of your total customer base after 5 years.
What’s the alternative? Eliminate the biggest barrier to paper suppression
Electronic consent is the process by which billers, banks, and other financial services providers go about getting a customer to agree to go paperless by turning off their USPS delivered documents in favor of receiving electronic versions.
The most common approach is asking the consumer to register at your self-serve portal or internet banking website and at some point during this enrollment, present them with the opportunity to turn off their paper document.
The fatal flaw with this approach, and primary reason for overall poor adoption, is this very step!
The customer experience of this ‘fetch’ strategy is a poor replacement for the traditional paper envelope, and diluting paper suppression activity within a self serve registration process results in an even lower adoption percentage.
There is a far more convenient, cost effective and successful way to suppress paper: Electronic consent via email followed by secure document delivery
The steps are quite straightforward:
Step 1: Verify that you have an accurate email address on file. This can be done without requiring any website visit or outbound phone call.
Step 2: Send a highly personalized email that requires just one click to agree to go paperless (you can attach a sample of the documents to this email).
Step 3: Capture the consumers consent choice WITHOUT linking them to your website.
Step 4: Suppress the USPS envelope and begin sending all appropriate documents as secure email attachments.
It’s as simple as that.
Use of your self-serve portal/website is of course of critical importance too. We therefore incorporate an automated portal registration process that does not require any customer action, into the eConsent process. Ask us how!
Gaining partial vs. full electronic consent
In addition to the convenience of one-click consent, we recommend that you use this opportunity to gain consent for paper suppression across ALL your document types. That way, when you get the opportunity to suppress a specific document type, you do not need to go back again and again to gather additional consent. We know it sounds counter intuitive but in reality, your customers couldn’t be bothered to manage complex preferences, even if giving them the choice appears to be the right idea.
In conclusion:
To gain meaningful paper turn off adoption, ditch the registration process!
Garin Toren
striata.com
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