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 Special
Report
Troubleshooting E.solutions
Industry Leaders Answer Your Questions
By Sarah
Hoke
February 2003 - docume.nt processing technology - To kick
off 2003, document has asked our advertisers to help answer some questions
businesses have when implementing electronic billing solutions. For those of
you who are just beginning to explore the many options online payment
presents, we hope this compilation will help you troubleshoot and explore
new opportunities. For those of you who are seasoned veterans of online
presentment and payment, we invite you to share your experiences by
contributing questions and answers. Perhaps your business has experienced
some of the challenges addressed here. If you have additional questions,
document is happy to address them in our online newsletter, eNotes. Why not
just save all emails on corporate email servers by adding more storage and
performing regular back-ups? Backing up an email server, at a given point in
time, does not save all emails. If a back-up is done once a night, an email
that is sent and deleted during the same day will not be backed up. Adding
more storage leads to rising costs and increased retrieval difficulty and
performance problems for mail servers. In addition, if the back-ups are done
at the mail server, they are backed up in a proprietary format, and new
releases of mail server software and changing mail server vendors will
affect the ability to restore the email. Imagine trying to retrieve all
documents from a given employee for the past three years by loading all of
his/her email for every nightly back-up tape set and then trying to
distinguish new emails that arrived or were sent since the previous nightly
back-up!
What is the best format for long-term storage of email?
Since there are many different types of proprietary mail formats and
customers may change vendors, upgrade their current mail vendor software or
have multiple mail vendors, it makes sense to store all email in a common
SMTP/MIME format. All major email vendors (e.g., Lotus Notes, MS Exchange)
support this format for mail being sent over the public Internet by using a
SMTP gateway, which converts the proprietary mail format in a standard
format.
If I’m using a Web-based invoicing solution, how will that integrate
with my existing receivables (payables) processes?
In order to be truly effective, in addition to delivering invoicing and
payment functionality, an EIPP solution must provide technology and services
to facilitate the seamless integration of the solution into a customer’s
existing business processes. BCE Emergis delivers this capability with its
Collaborative Services Platform — a comprehensive suite of enabling
technologies for communications and messaging. The Collaborative Services
Platform supports a wide range of physical connection options, transport
protocols, messaging formats (including proprietary ERP formats) and
security options, taking the benefits of EIPP beyond the simple elimination
of paper to drive savings throughout the back-end A/R and/or A/P processes
themselves.
The ROI of my EIPP initiative is dependent on adoption by external
organizations outside my direct control. What can I do to build this usage?
Adoption is not just enrollment. It takes ongoing use for an EIPP
solution to deliver on its promise. BCE Emergis addresses adoption from two
angles: convincing, then connecting. The convincing occurs through brandable
promotional tools that announce, demonstrate, prove, teach and remind. Even
large buying organizations that could mandate EIPP have learned they need to
recognize and promote their solutions’ benefits to trading partners. After
enrollment, the connecting uses enabling technologies to simplify and deepen
trading partner access. By leveraging their back-end systems and minimizing
business process disruptions, trading partners experience an even greater
return on effort, thus ensuring ongoing use.
How has your online analysis helped increase customer retention,
especially among business customers?
In a recent study with one of our telecommunications clients, we found their
customers using CallVision’s online analysis application were 91% less
likely to churn. Business customers typically use online analysis to
allocate expenses, measure the success of sales and marketing programs, and
mark-up and re-bill services. With our analysis solutions, business
customers can also create an unlimited number of custom reports, charts and
graphs to answer virtually any question they have about their services.
Clients tell us their business customers rely on online analysis to gain
insight into their businesses and meet their monthly reporting needs.
What are the leading companies doing to maximize the ROI they get from
their e-billing/customer care solutions?
Many companies are using first generation e-billing technologies to improve
billing and payment processing and reduce certain service costs.
Increasingly, we see the best companies deploying complete and feature-rich
customer self-service solutions on top of their e-billing platforms. This
involves expanding the variety of account-related data and services that
customers have access to online in a self-service environment. This involves
a lot more than making billing and payment available online or using a
knowledge base. These companies are giving their customers a comprehensive
self-service experience online that makes the Web site their first choice
for getting answers to all their questions rather than the call center. As a
result, they are driving much higher adoption levels and very good ROI.
What are the critical requirements of a robust e-billing/customer-care
solution?
It's no longer just about making billing and payment available online. The
real value today is in providing customers with a comprehensive self-service
experience that makes the Web site, not the call center, the first choice
for service. This accelerates adoption and multiplies the ROI companies are
realizing. To deliver on these capabilities, solutions must have five key
requirements: 1. Interactive access to high volumes of detailed account data
2. Customer-driven functionality and design based on actual top 10 customer
service calls 3. A seamless, managed transition between self-service and
assisted-service 4. Easy integration with key customer service systems and
processes 5. Continuous solution improvements to reflect actual customer
usage patterns
Why should I implement my own "biller-direct" EBPP technology when my
customers can already pay their bills through their banks and consolidators?
You have to ask why these companies would give away "pay anyone"
services that entail significant operations and costs. Bill consolidators
and the banks that use consolidator technologies don’t care to lose money on
bill payment, as their goal is to cross-sell other, more profitable
products.
If your company is a lender, insurer or other financial service provider,
you should be aware that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act largely
eliminated service boundaries, allowing banks to offer your customers a
whole suite of financial products, from insurance to investment. Even telcos
and utilities in deregulated states can’t ignore that Internet portals like
Yahoo! and MSN subsidize their bill pay services by advertising competitors’
products and services.
How can I achieve a return on investment from electronic bill
presentment when customer adoption is so low?
Most likely, you can’t. Internet bill presentment alone will not eliminate
your bill production mailing costs, as few customers will sign up for it,
and those who do will soon abandon it. Moreover, you’ll spend exponentially
more money trying to resolve all the new inquiries to your customer service
call centers resulting from EBPP.
Successful EBPP implementations are achieved through complementary
payment approaches. Payments can come through your Internet site, your call
centers or IVR, your collections department or your auto-debit program. So
your company has to maintain a clear view of all customer channels. From
there, you can determine how to add revenue and/or efficiency to your
customer-focused operations.
What is consumer reaction to email bill delivery?
Email bill delivery (meaning attachment of a secure document to regular
email) is the favorite of consumers. In an Eastern Seaboard market where
consumers could chose between the biller-direct model or an email
attachment, they chose email attachment nine times to every once for biller
direct. The email attachment model included Web viewing in case the mail was
deleted. Paper payments were possible when using email delivery because the
consumer printed the attachment, clipped the coupon and then sent it in with
a check. Optionally, a payment could be triggered by email reply if the
consumer didn't want to use the website to pay.
What adoption rate can I expect for email bill delivery?
The electronic delivery adoption rate for consumers will be about 2% the
first offering and 1/4% to 1/2% every offering thereafter. Maximum
penetration, the holy grail, is nearly 40%, but if you reach 10% in one to
two years, you are doing very well. An offering is a billing message,
envelope message or insert about electronic delivery. These percentages are
about 50% higher than customary electronic billing adoption because the
IPAYX system doesn't require banking information when enrolling. Banking
information is only required when paying. So many consumers who are too
tentative for Web payments will still enroll for email bill delivery.
What else should I look for in an electronic billing system?
A document archive can be used for reprints, fax and electronic
delivery, so I'd suggest a complete, searchable document archive should be
included. The ability to hold multiple document types and have a
sophisticated access control system would be helpful as well. Furthermore, a
complete set of customer service payment tools is needed so payments can be
accepted by telephone or fax. An agent should be able to adjust and reverse
payments as well as accept deposits for new accounts where a statement
hasn't yet been issued. Also, a truly handy Web electronic billing site
would accept payment from any customer whether they'd enrolled for
electronic delivery or not.
Can I connect to MasterCard RPPS for payments and presentment or do I
need to go to a third party processor?
MasterCard RPPS is an open network switch, and our customers come to us
either directly or via a third party processor. We are not a software
solution provider, so therefore anyone wishing to connect to us directly
will need to have either their own private software solution or a purchased
solution from a third party vendor. In addition, for bill presentment
distribution connectivity, RPPS supports a flat file or OFX server
connection. The flat file solution is a very economical way for BSPs and
CSPs to send OFX messages through our network.
How can our organization drive higher online presentment and payment
adoption rates?
Metavante partners with clients through the life cycle of their electronic
presentment and payment solution with proven and effective Adoption
Marketing support tailored to increase end-user awareness, adoption and
retention for online bill and statement presentment and payment. We believe
firmly that a strategic adoption marketing plan is a critical component of
all successful electronic billing programs, and that strong consumer
adoption and acceptance enables the cost efficiencies and revenue
enhancement our clients seek. To that end, Metavante works with clients to
leverage marketing resources, provide strategic direction, and integrate
online presentment and payment promotions with current marketing
initiatives.
Does the Metavante document composition product position companies to
meet their current and future business needs?
Yes, our goal is to enable customers to effectively brand themselves and
communicate to their customers through the best paper and electronic
channels available today with the extensibility to migrate from print to
electronic. With the introduction of CSF Communication Designer in 2002,
Metavante has reinforced its commitment to helping companies execute their
customer communication strategies and to generating rapid, measurable
results for organizations with document composition needs. Furthermore, the
product uses XML throughout the entire application to provide the
flexibility to integrate between applications and vendor products — still of
paramount importance — to leverage the appropriate capabilities of a
business' systems. Metavante also continues to make substantial investment
in new technology to address the needs of the marketplace. |
