Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: Importance of Billing Dispute management for building trusted brands

As an end customer of a communication service provider I always wish to see my bill as per my expectation. The basic expectation is to be billed correctly only for the services utilized by me. In all means the bill should not be a shock or a surprise. The impression from the first bill is usually carried by the customer throughout the customer life cycle. Hence it becomes imperative for the first bill to be well explained as suggested in my previous blog and further, to tackle disputes effectively and efficiently for better customer engagement and winning customer trust.

This expectation is more than often shattered by the billing disputes such as Payment disputes; Rating disputes; Promotion/discount disputes and other disputes for various charges levied. Some of the customer reactions with any of these billing disputes not being resolved would be:

 Loosing trust on the service provider and churn out when there is no resolution
 Spread a bad word of mouth through different social networking
 Billing default.

On the other hand, if these disputes are resolved effectively, it would lead to:

 Cross sell and up sell opportunity from a happy customer
 Customer loyalty

Dispute management depends on how robust the processes are while implementing billing systems. A robust system should be able to tackle either an issue created by the system or an issue that may be due to the processes touching the system. Any implementation needs to take care of both these issues to become a trusted brand.

These are just a few thoughts on importance of billing dispute handling; you are most welcome to add your further thoughts on this.