Telco customers are unsatisfied with their experience with billing and payments. In fact, billing, pricing, and payments issues are the number two cause of complaint for mobile, landline, and broadband customers in the UK this year. This can be attributed to a number of reasons, but the most likely is high expectations from consumers. Customers today are looking for greater personalisation, quality of service, and sophistication than ever before – and UK communication service providers (CSPs) are not delivering.
With customers expecting increasingly remarkable experiences and business ecosystems becoming increasingly complex, CSPs are facing new challenges. Many CSPs fail to realise that those upstream business ecosystem challenges manifest in the customer experience and alienate customers. To remain competitive and ensure the billing experience does not become a point of customer frustration, CSPs need to embrace digital transformation and take a holistic look at the customer journey, from the top down.
Driving efficiency from the source
The catalogue of CSP market offerings is set to explode, as CSPs shift to become the technology companies they traditional supported. Driven by B2B2X business models and powered by 5G, CSPs are investing in advanced solutions such as IoT, AI, and machine learning to drive new business opportunities, especially with enterprises. As we make strides in the digital-centric world, these new technologies and business processes also create unprecedented complexity, from catalogue management to complex order configuration and execution, to pricing.
If those complexities are not addressed and unravelled at the root, they will trickle down through the business and, eventually, land on the bill and generate customer frustration.
Efficiency and simplification start with automation. Real-time configuration, pricing, and quote management automation can create a seamless process for fulfilment and approvals. An automated order management system can offer reusable, out-of-the-box processes, and visual configuration to support proactive communication, order orchestration, and speed to activation. It also allows CSPs to automate processes like fulfilment, risk, and inventory management.
With these added efficiencies in place, CSPs can break their data out of siloes and generate a more valuable and centralised dataset. In turn, that data can be fed into AI-powered technologies to personalise and enhance the billing journey even further without losing the human touch.
Orchestrating a customised billing journey
Customers have infinite choices in today’s digital landscape, so they will more often than not choose the most seamless and authentic experience they can find. It comes as no surprise, then, that customer experience is the currency of competition. By personalising each customer’s billing journey and solving customer experience (CX) concerns at the root, CSPs have a unique opportunity to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition while positively impacting revenue and reinforcing brand identity.
There is substantial value in proactively communicating the billing process from start to finish. For example, if a customer has signed up for a trial period of a streaming service, they expect to be notified when their free trial is coming to an end before they get charged. Though providing customers the opt-out option may seem risky, customers are more likely to react positively and remain loyal when they are offered transparency. When the bill comes as a surprise, the business can come off as dishonest, as if sneaking fees past the customer. Often, billing surprises result in a greater volume of call centre communications and frustrated customers. What’s more, CSPs and streaming services providers can use the billing or “free trial ending” communication as an opportunity to demonstrate value and authenticity – they may flag that the customer watched 80 hours of a series and would likely be interested in related content or in finishing the series. Initiatives like these prove to customers that their service provider knows them and are working actively to bolster their experience.
CSPs can further personalise and improve the billing journey by considering channel preferences. There is an abundance of ways that customers may prefer to communicate with their service provider. In fact, and perhaps surprisingly, 86% of UK customers still prefer to communicate over the phone with their CSP. Although some consumers prefer one method over the other, it is critical to offer a diversity of channels for billing communication and issues resolution. Customers also expect technological sophistication, regardless of complexity, so billing leaders should ensure they are constantly assessing their technology assets and innovate to create a sophisticated and efficient experience.
Looking ahead
Today’s digital landscape has opened the doors for new opportunities for collaboration and co-opetition, creating a landscape ripe for innovation. This emerging ecosystem spills into billing as well, allowing CSPs to maximise revenue monetisation and customer experiences through advances in technology and cultural transformation. But to improve the billing experience, CSPs cannot start with the output statement; they need to look within and realise digital transformation from top to bottom to ensure that business complexity is resolved at the root. By engaging a trusted partner to support and simplify the digital transformation journey, CSPs can have the peace of mind knowing that their customers will see a sophisticated and personalized experience at every touchpoint – with billing and beyond.
