Improving Customer Satisfaction Through Billing

Nearly every large telecommunications provider is going through a billing migration or integration project in an effort to reduce the number of systems, reduce costs, and achieve visibility across multiple, converging product lines. Such long-term initiatives are vital for staying one step ahead of the competition and can reduce both billing and customer care costs.

However, these large, highly specialized IT programs can take several years and cost many millions of dollars to complete. As service providers rework their billing environments and processes, what often results from all of the change are poor bills and dissatisfied customers who are susceptible to churn. While the carrier is looking down the road and focusing all of its efforts on integrating many moving parts, customers can become or remain frustrated with incorrect, delayed or multiple bills. As a result, telecoms risk losing the customers they are working so hard to keep in the future, and in the meantime are missing out on valuable cross-selling, up-selling and relationship-building opportunities.

Service providers have tactical options that can allow them to ease customers’ transition and capitalize on ongoing customer interactions. Carriers can achieve improved, convergent, personalized communications with their customers while the long-term billing consolidation or migration project rolls on in the background. There are now technologies that can seamlessly integrate with multiple billing systems to derive the information necessary to create consistent, focused communications across all customer touch-points. These technologies can be implemented within three to six months and can reduce customer care and document production costs immediately. In some cases they can also provide incremental revenue that can help fund the larger, long-term project.

Challenges Frustrate Both Company and Customer

The recent history of the telecommunications service provider market is one of significant mergers and acquisitions. In the aftermath of the mega-mergers, the resulting entities can end up with anywhere from 5 or 10 to 50 or 100 disparate customer billing and OSS systems. One major North American carrier reports it is in the process of uniting and simplifying more than 100 separate billing systems in an effort to integrate bills for its cellular and wireless users, while also migrating them to the same system that supports its Internet and broadband customers. This is a typical story heard across the industry today.

As carriers take the necessary time to migrate to new billing systems, customers will not wait. Their propensity to switch due to poor service and/or confusion has inflated average churn levels among North American wireless telecom providers to between 23 and 31 percent annually, with some telecoms experiencing a 70 percent subscriber turnover. Such churn rates have a significant impact on a wireless carrier’s profit, considering that the average carrier spends around $350 annually for each new subscriber but makes only around $20 per month in profit per subscriber. Consider also that the Federal Communications Commission reports that roughly 88 percent of calls into telecom carriers’ call centers—which cost them about $1 per minute on average—are related to billing issues. Adding it all up, it’s obvious that a service provider will suffer significant increases in cost and declines in customer satisfaction and retention if short-term customer management issues are lost amidst long-term integration plans.

Five Steps Toward Enhancing Customer Communications Right Now

The right enterprise personalization software provides an infrastructure—one single platform—that seamlessly integrates with all types of systems and data sources to create consolidated, clearer, fully personalized bills that can reduce calls to the call center; reduce document product costs; and cross-sell and up-sell relevant product and services. In addition, a single platform for developing and managing all personalized customer communications across the enterprise ensures consistency and lowers total cost of ownership.

The following are five initial steps that telecoms can take, when they are in the midst of migrating to a new billing system, to make the most of available technology to immediately improve customer communications:

1. Find a technology platform that can seamlessly integrate with existing or new systems. The technology you choose should easily integrate with your existing customer data, regardless of the format of that data or the systems that drive it. With it, you should be able to independently produce personalized, clearer and more relevant customer communications for delivery through batch, real-time and interactive channels.

2. Conduct customer focus groups. The telecommunications industry ranks last in customer service of all major industries tracked. What’s more, the second largest number of calls handled by telecommunications service providers are billing-related. Customers are often confused by the information that providers send them. Take the time to gather customers together to understand how consumers read their mail or e-mail—78 percent of all mail is read over the trash can. This activity will help you redesign your statement to be clearer and provide information the way—and with the delivery channel—customers want.

3. Hire experts to help you design enhanced statements and correspondence. Many large firms have specialized practices in customer communications and can help you facilitate customer focus groups, conduct surveys and build internal consensus (marketing, customer services, receivables, billing, etc.). Their accumulated knowledge can help you avoid many common mistakes and show you what fonts are best, where messaging on the document makes sense, how to create a statement that will be clearly understood by the recipient. They will also focus on strategies for cutting down the number of pages, helping to save costs in printing and mailing.

4. Introduce enhanced statements and correspondence to a small subset of your customer base. Regardless of the time spent with customers up front, there are always permutations that are not anticipated but can generate even greater customer confusion. There are many ways to roll out an enhanced statement design project to a subset of the service provider’s customer base. It can be rolled out to employee customers, specific geographies or a particular customer segment. It is then important to collect feedback that can be used to improve the larger launch.

5. Prepare for a short period of increased customer service calls. Any change, good or bad, will result in some level of confusion and increased calls. One CLEC reported that some customers called just to say thank you for the new bill format and additional information. Generally, the number of customers and frequency of billing cycles will determine the duration of this period of increased call volume. The largest telecoms will have a full month of slightly increased volume. However, this initial period is then offset by many months of decreased calls due to better understanding and readability.

To be successful with each of these steps, mid- to large-sized service providers should set aside a small subset of the resources for their longer-term project to complete this tactical yet impactful enhancement to their customer communications. A team of representatives from marketing, customer service, billing, receivables, regulatory and IT should be built to handle, on a part-time basis, issues that are critical to the project’s success. A strong consensus-building leader—usually from customer service or IT, but not limited to those—is also needed to spearhead the project.

Remember, the customer is in control today. Telecom providers must act quickly in all situations to ensure that the customer experience remains seamless. While complete integration of billing systems across business subsidiaries is critical to long-term success, ensure that your customers don’t get lost in the process. An enterprise personalization software solution can improve your day-to-day billing operations by reducing costs, providing additional revenue and, most importantly, keeping your customers loyal and happy for the long haul.

Jim Norton is the vice president of telecommunications practice for Exstream Software, where he oversees planning, strategy, new customer acquisition and partnerships for Exstream’s telecommunications and utilities practices. You can contact Exstream at info@exstream.com or visit www.exstream.com.