Increase Customer Satisfaction and Improve Operations with an Optimized Billing Experience

When it comes to consumer-facing products, websites and services, you’ve likely heard the terms UX (user experience) and CX (customer experience). But have you ever considered BX, aka, the billing experience?

Often regarded as an accounting function, billing is largely seen and treated as a facilitator of payments rather than a customer satisfaction driver. In reality, billing is one of the most critical customer touchpoints across any organization, serving as both a collector of payments and a barometer for customer satisfaction.

What makes for a superior billing experience and how can you avoid the pitfalls that create unnecessary friction within your BX? Let’s take a look at the proper way to evaluate your current platform and discover the improvements you can make to boost on-time payments and overall customer satisfaction.

Bill Pay Insight from the Consumer Perspective

First, let’s dispel the notion that “bill due” equals “bill paid.” A recent report from PYMNTS.com shows that 72% percent of consumers cite essential services as a key reason for prioritizing one bill over another¹. Or, thinking about it a different way, 28% of consumers do not prioritize their bills based on how essential the service may be.

Additionally, 14% of consumers identify the ease of making payments as a key factor in the decision-making process for which bills to prioritize. This number rises to 23% for Millennials.

Taken together, these stats highlight the importance of delivering optimal BX to ensure that bills are paid, essential service or not, so your organization collects. Through no fault of their own, this is typically where most organizations fall short. Sending bills and receiving payments is often viewed as a simple, transactional process, which turns it into a business blindspot.

Instead, billers must shine a spotlight on their current billing experience if they are to optimize BX. For starters, consider your own bill pay experiences as a consumer. Which bills do you prioritize and which do you typically tend to put off? Do you take advantage of capabilities such as AutoPay or saved payment methods when offered? Have you used a chatbot to pay a bill online? Which payment method do you tend to use the most? Which do you wish your billers would offer that they don’t already?

The key here is to take your everyday experience and objectively measure it against your organization’s BX. Think about the bills you put off and why. It might be something as simple as having to re-enter card data each time you make a payment. Is that something you ask of your bill payers? This small bit of self-assessment can go a long way toward optimizing your BX and getting your bill to the top of the paid pile.


Customers Will Pay for Improved BX

To put into perspective how important overall BX is to consumers, consider that according to a PYMNTS.com study, 51% of consumers are so impressed with a streamlined digital bill payment process that they would even be willing to pay extra to use such a system.

A simplified billing experience brings ease and usability to the bill payer’s doorstep, saving time and energy when paying bills or receiving communications from their biller. In fact, more billers are charging user fees to offset the cost of credit cards and technological innovations. So far, consumers have widely accepted these additional charges, knowing the innovations they are paying for will save them time and effort.