Curtain Call

By Tara Seals

Clever marketing, better-than-ever customer service and an ever-growing array of interesting service bundles may be the glamorous face of the communications industry today, but the often underappreciated telecom bill plays just as important a part in the theater of customer interaction. Proper bill presentment can reduce operational expenditures for the service provider, aid marketing efforts and promote smooth cash flow. All of that has the bill starring in a critical role.

“The idea behind a well-presented bill is to get the bill paid as quickly as possible with as few issues as possible,” explains Teresa Zwiener, vice president of client services for the Print and Mail Division at CSG Systems, a billing and CRM vendor that prints 53 million statements per month on behalf of its carrier clients. “A well put-together bill may look pretty, but it also reduces the number of calls to the customer service representatives [CSRs] and makes the carrier more efficient.”

Bill design has been given fresh life lately as product bundles for enterprises and new services proliferate. “Even though there is a trend to flat-rated products, there are also now multiple products, so the telecom service environment is much more complex,” says Craig Brooks, vice president of corporate development at DCA Services, which offers outsourced print-and-mail services along with billing, consulting and customer care. “Multiplays are one more hook to keep the subscriber, but you have to translate that complexity onto one bill in a readable way.” DCA will take an invoice and help service providers migrate their bills to a new layout or logo gradually so as “not to spook the herd,” as Brooks puts it. “Building a new look requires a sanity check - is it easily understood? Everyone likes a clean summary to hit them, and they need to quickly see if the last payment was received, new charges and so on. Enterprise customers have different, higher expectations and will be disgruntled if the invoice is not what they are expecting or just a mess. We have established processes in place to avoid that situation.”

Further complicating the billing environment is the rise of new payment plans. “Corporate billing structures in particular have a lot of layers,” explains Randy Minervino, vice president of marketing at Profitec Inc., a billing service and software company. “In the old days, you didn’t have to worry about anything but usage, and it was common for everything to roll up on one bill for corporate headquarters. Now, different users have different services that different locations are willing to pay for.” For instance, a brokerage firm may pay for the handset and usage of a wireless phone during certain hours, while the brokers are responsible for charges after 5 p.m. Or, there may be a need to invoice the equipment to one location and the usage to a different location.

Some service providers see the invoice as not simply impacting customer retention, but as a key piece of it. “We take bill presentment very seriously,” says Mark Chodoronek, senior director of e-business application management at MCI Inc., which generates its own invoices inhouse. “It’s no longer about throwing a bill out there to get paid. It’s a reflection of why the customer decided to sign up with us, and as services become more complicated, it’s critical that we maintain the level of quality that made them decide to go with MCI. A hard-to-understand bill will not keep the customer happy.”

MCI has a billing quality task force that conducts focus groups on everything from color effectiveness to the benefits of organizing data alphabetically. A team also goes out to customer sites two or three times a year to review invoices and gather information for improving readability. The task force consults analysts and graphics experts to round out its knowledge base. “Good bill design reduces customer churn, and that’s a fact, especially for enterprises,” says Chodoronek.

Effective bill printing and presentment isn’t limited to making billing easier to understand for the customer. CSG has a new take on the familiar bill presentment theme of opex reduction with the embrace of PLANET Code, a bar code technology from the U.S. Postal Service that allows pieces of mail to be tracked through each point in the mail stream, much like FedEx or UPS tracking. CSG sees its potential for tracking remittances. “The ability to track things changes business actions,” says Zwiener. “We can integrate the data into the CSRs’ systems, so if someone calls and says the check is in the mail, the CSR can verify that and waive a late fee.” PLANET Code also saves money in delinquency actions. If a carrier is about to send a follow-up letter or make a call, it can save the cost for that by simply checking if the payment has been mailed first with an automated process.

The invoice also can be used as a marketing tool. DCA educates customers on how to make the most of that monthly guaranteed contact with the customer. “A reseller can sell off space on the envelope or bill to anyone,” says Brooks. “The key is to not make it look like junk mail. The invoice is also a great way to provide crossmarketing or upsell information.”

OSG Billing Services for instance completely overhauled the bill printing strategy for Carolina West Wireless (CWW), located in the western region of North Carolina. Although it has more than 40,000 customers, the provider offers many of the same features, plans and programs available from larger wireless companies. Its monthly bill is its only contact with most of its customers. And its call center logged upwards of more than 7,500 calls a month, 40 percent of them concerning billing problems. Bill production was, in short, affecting the bottom line.

OSG was able to change the look and flow of the invoice to make it more readable and to reduce the number of pages in the bill, saving call center and postal costs. However, CWW says the biggest value to overhauling bill production was in the addition of marketing capabilities. “OSG Billing Services had a more comprehensive business solution for Carolina West Wireless,” says Mike Kennedy, the operator’s commercial manager. “I knew the problems hurting revenue assurance could be alleviated; however, producing revenue through the marketing offerings made this a win-win-win situation for the company.”

OSG consulted with the company to create upsell campaigns and brand awareness marketing via the bill. For instance, an unlimited calling plan insert that was delivered in two mailings with no other supplemental advertising generated 400 customer signups for the plan - a 12 percent response rate. CWW can enact such campaigns itself via “OSG Dynamic Messaging,” which allows operators to create a promotional or educational message on the first page of the invoice. To present a more polished look, there is also a library of graphics and photographs available for the user to upload.

Meanwhile, online presentment and ebilling continues to be a critical favorite on the bill production stage. Profitec, for instance, delivers 20 percent of its invoices electronically, up from 7 percent in 2003. Minervino says electronic presentment is a focus area for his company. “Mostly what we’re seeing is a need for a summary paper invoice with a remittance slip, and the other information is available online - details and archived information for six to eight months.”

The benefit of providing the detail online makes the bill part of an overall self-care strategy for the carrier. “We can provide usage to date, how much traffic each ANI is carrying, activation dates, features and so on - things that customers may normally call the reseller or provider for.- The company also offers OmniAgent, which gives agents access to their customers’ e-bill information for customer service purposes. “This is a differentiator,” he says.

MCI also is embracing electronic presentment via its portal, Customer Care, newly revamped this year. In fact, the carrier charges its enterprise customers for paper billing. MCI presents the same bill a company would receive in paper form online, something Chodoronek calls “paper parity.” In addition, enterprise customers can perform analysis, call up charts and graphs that slice and dice the data by a number of metrics, see statistics by department, submit disputes and perform reconciliation, and the system archives bill and usage information for up to seven years to comply with such regulations as Sarbanes- Oxley and tax law. Overall, the carrier has seen a 163 percent increase in use of the portal, with 35 percent of all invoices viewed electronically. “This approach saves storage space, time and trees,” says Chodoronek. “But mainly it’s allowing the customer to, on their own terms and time, perform one-stop account care.” MCI is continuing to add functionality to the portal to encourage its use; in April, it added a statement of account functionality, where customers see the last invoice, last payment and new charges at the top of the summary.

Online or in hand, bill presentment and printing innovations will continue to develop, leading to a long run in the spotlight. “It’s such an invaluable way to reach out to the customer,” says an OSG spokeswoman. “Good bill practices give some service providers a fresh form of customer retention. We’ll continue to see a lot of interest in developing this area.”