Saving trees – killing the Post Office

Canada Post employees recently went on strike – after two weeks and with no end in sight, companies in Canada are using this opportunity to migrate customers to eBilling at a rapid rate. Although the driver here is actually hard cost savings, the outcome is that there will be even less paper bills and statements and hence less revenue for Canada Post, resulting in more cut-backs and downsizing. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

The centuries old postal system is under significant threat – but is that our problem?

Death of an institution

In the last five years, the US Postal Service has seen its mail drop by 43.1 billion pieces. No business can survive such a radical drop in demand for its services and hope to continue business as usual.

In the UK there is constant talk about privatising the Royal Mail. In fact, this has been going on for years, with downstream access already doing the bulk sorting and distribution for thousands of businesses.

What the post office always had was a monopoly on the last mile. No-one else wanted to have the headache of employing feet on the street, but the internet has created an entirely new delivery mechanism that is fast replacing traditional print and post. Of course, the consequence of this is the constantly declining volumes of corporate mail and the reality of a shrinking business model.

Every business knows that when faced with declining revenues, you need to reduce costs and cut your cloth accordingly. I guess the unions (in the case of Canada Post) and thousands of people involved in post office business models make this a difficult process.

Luddite behaviour

Unionised post office workers are the 21st century equivalent of the Luddites; their strikes are the modern day equivalent of destroying the mechanised looms that put them out of work. However, as with the Industrial revolution, there is a fundamental change afoot. Any industrial action by post office workers plays into the hands of eBilling companies and once the ‘genie is out of the bottle’, it’s hard to get it back in again - very few people go back to paper once they move to eBilling.

Post Offices around the world are reviewing their business models (we see their consultants on our website every week.) Bills and statements, once the mainstay of postal volumes, are rapidly moving to electronic delivery. For the post office to reinvent itself, it will need to embrace the connected world we now live in. It’s getting some help from ecommerce - home delivery of purchases (a possible future headline - “Amazon saves the post office”?) But is that enough?

Spare a thought for the postman

When considering eBilling, we weigh up environmental and costs savings vs. paper production and cost of distribution. The fact that the post office is now a shrinking business model is proof that many more businesses are realising the benefits and ROI associated with eBilling and are actively migrating customers from paper to electronic documents.

So while you enjoy the eBilling benefits of instant delivery, one-click payment, soft copy storage, interactive sorting and graphing and consequently saving a few trees, spare a thought for your local postman, his job is under threat. But as the cliché goes – it’s not personal, it’s just business.

Is it time to end Usernames & Passwords forever?

Do you hate usernames and passwords as much as your customers do?

Choosing and remembering multiple usernames and passwords for eBilling and self serve portals is a poor customer experience and incredibly expensive for billers. It is furthermore one of the most significant barriers to paper suppression.

Uniquely chosen usernames and passwords are intended to make websites secure, but instead, billers are simply passing the responsibility of security onto their users. In many instances, this is accompanied by predatory terms and conditions (read this blog post: Check the small print, you assume all the risk)

In truth, consumers do an extremely poor job of securing their access:

• One in ten still regularly use the word 'password'
• One in four use their mother's maiden name
• 15% use a pet's name and 10% a child's name
• Only 3% use a random password
• 30% of users have forgotten their password

Source: TNS/OneVu 2007

Customers just don't want it!

Customers are constantly telling us that the username and password process is not desirable. The December 2010, InfoTrends eBilling Report showed that 61% of consumers surveyed said that remembering multiple unique usernames and passwords remains a barrier to paperless adoption.

Not convenient for billers either

One of the biggest complaints from billers utilizing self-serve portals is the thousands of phone calls to their call centres every month from customers who have forgotten their login details. Each call costs the biller an average of $3.50 to $8.00. Online self service was meant to be cheaper and more convenient. Unfortunately in many cases it is neither. This is particularly so in circumstances where the customer rarely visits the biller's portal. This includes utilities, insurance companies and telecommunication service providers.

To date, the primary reason for customers visiting a biller's website was to make a payment. With the trend moving away from biller direct to internet banking bill pay, even this reason is dissipating.

Does eBilling have to come at the cost of customer convenience?

If username and password authentication is a poor customer experience, expensive for the biller, as well as a security risk; then how does one protect sensitive customer information and deliver on convenience, while moving to a paperless eBilling solution? Is there a way to provide an eBilling solution that is secure, cost efficient and most of all – convenient enough for the customer to turn off paper?

While it is in the interest of the biller to pull customers to their website in order to cross-sell and up-sell other goods and services, inconveniencing the customer in the process seems paradoxical.

If billers could truly deliver the bill electronically (as opposed to creating a 'fetch' scenario), they would also have a way to market to that consumer intelligently, and most importantly, in a cost effective way that is actually more convenient for the consumer.

Should additional self-service be available on the biller's website, then you can always drive them there after satisfying the primary purpose of bill delivery.

Creating the best possible customer experience:

1. Gain consent from the customer to go paperless without requiring a website registration.

2. Eliminate website registration (the number one barrier to paper suppression) by auto registering the customer at your self-serve portal and let them know that you have done so.

3. Utilize two to three simple questions to authenticate their portal access (think about when you called your bank recently, chances are they asked you 3 to 4 simple questions about yourself that only you could logically know the answers to).

4. Only ask them to choose a username and password if they are going to access the website very regularly and the question process in point 3 above is too lengthy for daily use.

For example: If I'm only visiting my insurer's website a few times a year, then asking me 2/3 simple questions is far more convenient than asking me to remember a username and password I chose 6 months ago. If I am accessing my Internet Banking more than once a week, then of course in this instance a username and password is the more convenient option.

Customers will turn off paper as long as it's convenient to do so, and while redundant authentication processes remain, eBilling adoption just won't happen.

Let's end consumer frustration and expensive customer care phone calls once and for all.

Email is very much alive and kicking

In the wake of social media, instant messaging and any other alternate and efficient means of communicating - one would surmise that email must be taking a back seat. However, many of these new technologies rely heavily on email for registration and notifications relating to their service.

While Facebook has 500 million active users, email makes Facebook look like a poor cousin in comparison. With no technology currently available to replace the messaging and notification capability of email, I see many more fruitful years of content filled emails ahead.

Some points to consider

Yes, it is true that around 80% of all email sent worldwide is SPAM, but how much of that SPAM actually reaches a user's inbox? SPAM filters have become incredibly sophisticated. But it's important to keep in mind that SPAM won't go away if people stop using email, it is channel agnostic and will merely follow people to their next choice of messaging channel (and in many cases, it already has.)

Yes, email is an old technology but email is not static - there are regular advancements in this space (Google's priority inbox, is one of the latest examples.) However, email must continue to innovate to keep pace with additional digital communication channels and I am confident it will.

Email is not dying

Recent stats in a blog published by Royal Pingdom go even further to prove that email is far from dead. Impressive numbers of email users of the world's largest three webmail services include Yahoo (Yahoo Mail) with 340 million users and Microsoft (Hotmail) with 450 million users (user numbers as per Doubleclick ad planner)

The statistics become even more compelling when coupled with information on how these services contribute to overall website traffic to their respective domains.

Gmail gets 23% of the traffic to Google.com.
Hotmail gets 39% of the traffic to Live.com.
Yahoo Mail gets 20% of the traffic to Yahoo.com.

What stands out is how large these percentages are in terms of total traffic to each domain. For Google and Microsoft, webmail traffic accounts for the second highest source in domain traffic and Yahoo Mail contributes more traffic to Yahoo.com than any other single contributor.

If any of these companies chose to discontinue their webmail services, they would suffer financial devastation through the loss of advertising revenue and valuable user behaviour statistics. They would also lose the ability to influence user behaviour through additional offerings such as Google Buzz.

Email is still the people's choice

Where does this bring us? Email is still very much alive and kicking! Choice has become the order of the day. People can choose their preferred medium of communication and while it doesn't pretend to be the best at everything, email delivers on many functions where alternatives just don't quite make the grade yet.

How is email working for you?

Nicola Els
striata.com