eBilling horror stories! Do you have one?

An interesting story appeared in my Google Alerts a little while ago regarding an eBilling problem in Texas. What made it interesting to me was that the company involved – a water utility – had done many good things with regards to their eBilling, but fell at the last hurdle and ended up disconnecting an innocent customer. Not good for public relations! The full story is here.

In brief, when eBilling was introduced the utility sent out paper and eBills to the customer for a few months, before defaulting her to eBilling. In general, this process improves the eBilling adoption rate dramatically - reducing paper and postage costs and is good practice – as long as you know the customer is receiving the eBills! It turns out that this particular customer's email address was 2 years out of date, and she never received any eBill or notice that she was being defaulted to eBilling. To make matters worse, the utility noticed that the eBills weren't being paid and so occasionally sent out paper bills to "catch up", which were received and paid on time. But they then continued with eBilling until they disconnected her…

eBilling is not just about sending electronic bills…

Clearly whilst the eBilling platform was probably successfully sending out eBills, the required read-receipt and delivery reporting wasn't in place. Clearly the processes dealing with exceptions weren't water-tight.

In a similar story but much closer to home; my friend got a call from her bank today telling her that payments toward her new credit-card – issued in September – had never been received and over US$400 in late fees was now due. It turns out that she thought she'd set up a direct debit payment (and hadn't – so that's her fault), but had also signed up for eStatements. These eStatements necessitated following a link back to a website and a log in to view the statement, and she'd just never bothered to do so as it was too much trouble (and hey, it was being paid automatically anyway, wasn't it…?) Did the bank not know she'd never viewed an eStatement? Should alarm bells not have started ringing after the first credit-card bill wasn't paid rather than 4 months later? Seems not!

The poor water customer in Texas had to pay a substantial reconnection fee but thankfully for my friend, her late fees were waived. However in both instances the customer ended up inconvenienced, disgruntled and dissatisfied with the electronic billing process.

Both of these stories show how the delivery of an eBill is only the start of the eBilling process, not the end of it! Convenience is critical to ensure eBills or eStatements are actually viewed. Monitoring of delivery and read-receipts is required, as is having automated processes set up to deal with issues. An eBill bounces? Then automatically send the customer an SMS… No reply to that? Then send a paper bill and get the call-centre to follow-up with the customer. And before eBilling begins, the adoption process has to be fail-safe but optimized to ensure the highest possible paper suppression rates.

Is it all starting to sound a bit more complicated than just attaching a PDF bill to an email? Then speak to the experts who have been doing it for 10 years…

Keith Russell
www.striata.com