Electronic billing can effectively reduce costs as long as there is a clear strategy of ensuring customer adoption.

This is the second part in the series of How to speed up your document processing!

Let’s define what ebilling isn’t! It’s not sending emails with attachments such as excel, word or PDF these are not considered e-invoices.

E-billing is the electronic transmission of formatted data between a sender and receiver and requires that the format is machine readable like XML or UBL to be able to exchange data. This means that there has to be integration between the senders and receivers I.T. systems or the usage of a third party platform to connect sender and receiver.

How does e-billing reduce costs?

The whole point of ebilling is to reduce the costs associated with the manual intervention of shuffling paper and resolving missing or invalid data on the invoice.

Ebilling has come along way in the last few years but still only represents a small percentage of the total numbers of invoices processed annually across Europe. Deutsche Bank research showed that 5% of the 30bn invoices processed in Europe in 2010 were electronic leaving 95% of invoice processing still very much a manual entry process which is time intensive, resource sensitve and prone to human errors.

One of the main reasons ebilling fails and the take up of a paperless solution is lacklustre is as a result of a Company’s ebilling adoption strategy. The solution on offer can have excellent features, outstanding customer benefits, offer the promise to reduce costs which will benefit your bottom line but if your  customers don’t want to adopt eBilling as a viable alternative to your paper bill then your ebilling offering will crash and burn and end up by being an additional cost and system that requires ongoing maintenance.

If you are serious about creating a paperless billing solution you must have a clear strategy that leads to the turning off of paper for your customers and be almost single-minded in the adoption of ebilling.

Ideally you want an immediate return on investment when you’ve made a conscious effort to move to an e-bill solution and a decrease in operational costs associated with producing, printing and distributing paper bills. Sadly, this is rarely the case.

Banks, Companies, Financial Institutions have made massive investments in their websites trying to drive customers to an electronic option but these sites are failing to drive customers to adopt an electronic option.

Why?

Because websites are forcing customers to come to a website portal with a request to register and then collect their invoices; therein lies the problem, a natural human resistance to physically find the time to go and collect a bill that has been emailed to you. Why would you go and fetch a bill from a suppliers website to then register, login and remember a password?

“Would you drive your car to your suppliers to collect an invoice for your company?” 

Probably not!

Customers don’t opt for web based presentment to collect their bills and web portals have not succeeded in driving customers to want to adopt an ebill instead customers prefer the convenience of receiving an invoice in the mail.

How do you ensure your ebilling strategy is a success?

1. Find an advisor who is an independent expert on the the understanding of the billing outsource process
2. Request an initial consultation to determine your current position and what you want to achieve
3. Have a clear strategy for collecting email addresses
4. Use your website to drive paperless billing
5. Use messages on all your print based invoices, statements, remittances and envelopes
6. Have a sign up process on your website, paper invoices and statements
7. Use an email campaign for opt in and opt out to encourage the take up of ebills
8. Use any marketing collateral sent out to advise customers you are moving to paperless billing to drive the message home
9. Use the process to demonstrate your company’s on-going commitment to being green
10. If you use/have a call centre ensure staff are made aware to prompt customers of their email addresses and have a process of collecting/managing them
11. Use IVR (interactive voice response) to prompt customers when they holding on the telephone
12. Have an internal manager or champion of the ebilling process to ensure that the project is managed to its implementation

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