Spoilt for choice

Electronic billing has progressed passed the straightforward delivery or presentation of a bill by e-mail or on the Web. Customers have access to a number of channels by which to communicate with an organisation including short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), fax, the ATM network, interactive voice response and personal digital assistants.

The key to a successful e-billing strategy is to provide the recipient with choice. Whether a consumer or a business, the bill recipient should be able to indicate their preferred channel of communication, as well as their preferred bill format.

One person may want to receive their cellular invoice and statement by secure e-mail, while also needing the ability to analyse their itemised call lists on a Web site.

Each individual will have personal preferences, which if met, could be the key to that customer`s continued loyalty to your organisation.

Alison Wright, sales and marketing director, Striata

Another person may prefer to receive an SMS notification that their bill has been posted on the Web, and be able to access that bill at their leisure.

Each individual will have personal preferences, which if met, could be the key to that customer`s continued loyalty to your organisation.

A multi-channel electronic communication strategy is going to be a key success factor for organisations that want to continue to wow their customers with increasingly progressive service.

To facilitate this kind of one-to-one communication architecture, organisations have to open a dialogue with their customers to gather the information needed to customise their channel strategy. In addition, the biller needs an application that records each customer`s profile, and can output these preferences into an integrated multi-channel messaging process.

The most significant challenge in achieving this one-to-one utopia is the ability to take data from multiple sources and in various formats, and create one data repository that can be the basis from which all messages are built and presented or delivered.

Organisations typically do not have all the required data residing in one application or even one geographical location. To reconcile all of this data into one format and one location is a significant project, but one that will enable true one-to-one communication.

The benefit of this architecture is the much sought-after `single view` of the customer. If all messaging data resides in one repository, then all activity can be reported in a consolidated view of each customer`s interaction history.

Organisations with multiple customer touch-points can finally co-ordinate their communications, thereby leveraging each individual message, as opposed to flooding the customer with too many messages, and running the risk of succeeding with none.

Customers also appreciate the flexibility to change their chosen channel. If they initially opted to receive their invoices by e-mail and their Internet link is temporarily down, the option to have a time-critical invoice delivered by fax is highly impressive.

This sounds simple, but for many organisations, the reissuing of billing documents can be an ongoing nightmare. For billers that only produce paper bills, a lost invoice can mean lengthy and costly reprinting by their print supplier. With a sometimes unreliable postal service, missing invoices can become a real bugbear, chewing up valuable resources without recouping the cost to reprocess.

The phenomenal growth in mobile telephony has introduced a further channel by which to reach customers. More people own mobile phones than are connected to the Internet, providing a channel that also reaches a larger target market.

While not many people have adopted technologies like WAP, which enable a full statement to be accessed via a cellphone, almost everyone is using SMS. This interaction method is cheaper than a cellular call and enables brief messages to be exchanged between organisation and subscriber.

SMS marketing is on the increase, and is experiencing similar growing pains as e-mail did in its infancy. SMS spam could become a real problem if guidelines are not put in place to enable the basic courtesies of permission-based marketing: replying to an SMS sender and unsubscribing from a list.

SMS has its limitations for e-billing, however, forcing the biller to limit the number of characters, and being a store and forward type of application rather than a live interaction. It is more likely to be used as a notification service, rather than another channel by which to receive an invoice.

The new, new mobile text application is Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which enables session-based communication, rather than the one-way push interaction of SMS.

The applications enabled by USSD are menu-based and as such it enables fast interaction between the user and an application. Real-time mobile text chatting will be enabled by USSD. This technology will assist in promoting mobile phones to e-billing channels.

The most significant development in the e-billing space this year will be the broadening of choice offered to the customer adopting electronic channels. While the Web and e-mail used to be the primary options, customers will increasingly be able to add other channels to their profiles, receiving multiple documents and messages through different mediums, as and when they choose.