Carriers around the globe simply are not listening to their enterprise customers when it comes to their billing needs and expectations — and carriers are losing 10 percent of those customers as a result.
The results of a survey conducted by Accenture in order to see how enterprise customers perceived their carriers and how those carriers perceived their own capabilities and performance revealed an alarming disconnect between the two.
This has led not only to poor performance, but also to misapplied investment as carriers focus on areas customers aren’t all that interested in, such as multiple payment methods.
“Customers are at risk,” said Robert Purks, a senior executive in Accenture's Communications practice who leads its North American billing group. “When 10 percent of enterprise customers say they left their carrier because of inefficient billing processes and another 1 percent are considering leaving for the same reason, there is a significant disconnect.”
What’s worse, say enterprise customers, is the inability, or unwillingness, of carriers to resolve the problems leading to billing errors.
“It gets down to whether carriers are spending the effort and clock-cycles to measure their own performance,” Purks said.
Many are not. Only 56 percent of carriers surveyed said they measured customer satisfaction for billing. In the survey, Accenture offered 11 key metrics for measuring billing performance and asked carriers if they used them. Less than 52 percent were using them consistently.
“This is not to say all carriers don’t try to assess their performance in some way, but it was surprising to find some of these simplistic and fairly standard metrics were not consistently covered,” Purks said.
These metrics include simple targets for the maximum number of bill adjustments in a given time period. Only 45 percent have such a target.
The most damaging part of this statistic is that it shows too many carriers may have lost sight of an important factor: “Billing is the most frequent and consistent communication a company has with its customers,” Purks said. “And regardless of the economic climate, minimizing the importance of billing is like leaving money on the table, especially when solutions can enable carriers to more effectively manage their billing capabilities, control costs and increase retention.”
To make matters worse, only a low percentage of carriers are even surveying their customers to determine their needs, according to the survey. This leads to architectural investments that may be a mismatch for what customer want or don’t want. Purks said carriers’ understanding of their customers’ expectations is off kilter and in some cases carriers are investing in the wrong places. For instance, many carriers have invested heavily in providing multiple channels for enterprise customers to pay their bills, but this did not strike a chord in the enterprise space. It was ranked as being very important only by 2 percent of enterprise customers.
“There is also a heck of a lot of investment in bundled services, but billing for bundled services was only ranked as important by 19 percent of customers,” Purks said.
Some of the other disconnects that became apparent in the Accenture survey include the 84 percent of enterprise customers who said efficiently solving billing inquiries was very important and the 55 percent who received favorable ratings for doing so.
Sixty-two percent of customers ranked easy-to-understand bills as being very important, but only 22 percent felt the bills they received qualified as easy to understand. Customers felt only 47 percent of their billers delivered error-free bills even though it was among their most important attributes of 90 percent of them. The other 10 percent acknowledge there will be errors, but want them fixed efficiently.
