Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: Telecom Bill in a Customer friendly format in Multi service scenario

With the surge in telecom service providers’ offerings for value added services, telecom bill has become complex with plethora of information in the bill. The challenge lies in striking the balance between ease of use for customer in understanding the bill and the service provider’s ease of implementation.

In this Quad play world, convergence is the buzz word. Billing systems support Quad play billing but the challenge is how effective and customer friendly the bill is. A typical Quad play can have the following services:

 Mobile
 IPTV
 Fixed line
 Broadband

Any customer experience with a complex Quad play bill would be:

 Segmenting the different charges billed for different services
 Reconciling the total sum of all services
 Checking the current bill of each services
 Checking the previous balances of each services if any
 Identifying in which service the usage has increased and where the usage has come down
 Which tariff to go for based on the services
 Understanding the overall charges, subcomponents, summary and other charges

An ideal Quad play bill should take care of all the above complexities and it should be as simple as possible. The customer segment differs from premium to normal and high ARPU to average ARPU. At the same time, customer background also varies across service geographies. This also plays a major role while implementing billing systems and bill formats.

These are just a few thoughts on Customer friendly Bill template; you are most welcome to add your further thoughts on this.

Comments

Sripathy,

Believe, from a customer perspective, the most important thing is the correct comprehension of the bill.

1. Bill Language- Does the customer get the bill in a language he/she understands.

3. Type of billing-anniversary or monthly. Monthly billing is more difficult to understand for the customer as the customer may not have started the service from exactly the start of the month whereas the rental charges are billed monthly.
Rental charges are normally charged in advance whereas usage charges are charged on actuals.
4. Comprehension of discounts provided/cross product discounts/ adjustments given.
5.Bill format- Braille, large print, normal as per customer requirement.
6. Final bills/ Post termination bills- How are the rentals adjusted in the final bill provided.
7. Deposits/ Advance- How are deposits/ advance reflected in the bill. How/ after what duration are they adjusted.
8. Method of Accounting- Open item/ brought forward. Does the previous unpaid balance gets bought forward to the new invoice or is it tracked separately on the original invoice.

The above need to be taken into consideration when designing a bill template in a format which the customer is likely to understand without any external help. Adding to that the complexity of billing different products in the same bill.

One way is to use explanatory messages in the bill, specifically in the initiation bill. Else, this will reflect in increased calls to the voice customer support channel which is an added cost to the service provider.

Commented by: Kanwar Virender | February 12, 2010 5:50 AM

Hi Virender,

You are right! That too considering Bill is the primary face of service providers' customer communication.

Customer education on bill template is very much required and it can be done in a way you suggested by use of explanatory message in the bill, other ways to do that can be:

1. Welcome call after activating the service explaining the bill format(A sample bill can be sent before this call)

2. Service provider webportal to have simulation on the Bill with explanations.

3. Customer service Kiosks to have these simulations.

4. Email to customers with a detailed bill explanations or presentations.

5. IVR/SMS/WAP educations.

6. Customer contact camps.

All of these need to be coupled in a logical sequencing and mainly the descriptions in the bill template should be very clear and easy to understand.

Apart from Static templates, there should be dynamic messages to indicate any new bill items.

Trust these are Valid to your thoughts? Please comment your views.

Commented by: Sripathy | February 12, 2010 9:37 AM

Yes. I agree. Which of these can actually be provided will depend on the cost the CSP is ready to incur to educate the customer.

Commented by: Kanwar Virender | February 15, 2010 5:26 AM