How to Modernize Your Utility Billing Process 

The secret lies in streamlining systems that can create opportunities for revenue growth, improved engagement, and overall better customer experiences.

When you think about the kinds of services utilities support, such as water, electricity, natural gas etc., it makes sense to explore these daily conveniences as a model for how to modernize your utility billing process.

Many utilities face common challenges in their billing modernization journey. Outdated systems, costly operations, and inefficient processes drain resources, resulting in lost revenue, a poor customer experience, and declining customer engagement.

The Challenges of Omnichannel Billing for Today’s Utilities

Let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges in modernizing the billing process:

• Outdated billing systems: Customers want fast resolutions to their problems. But if your systems bury data in silos, reconciling customer profiles with service requests becomes difficult, leading to billing errors and delayed payments.
• Limited payment channels: Legacy systems and manual billing processes can contribute to late or missed payments. And if your customers are feeling limited by your payment channel offerings, there could be serious impacts on customer engagement.
• Poor design and user experiences: A clunky, crowded interface creates a bad impression. When customers struggle to access personalized billing statements, it lowers engagement, creates dissatisfaction, and leads to increased call volumes.
• Costly operations: Legacy systems often mean siloed data, disconnected vendors, and patchworked solutions. These setups cost time and money, and a loss in productivity.
• Regulatory compliance in billing: As regulated organizations, utilities must meet strict communication standards. Outdated processes can make compliance difficult, leading to severe fines and penalties.

Find Out How to Modernize Your Utility Billing Process to Boost Engagement and Accelerate Revenue

A modernized billing process has the potential to level up every part of your business, from internal operations to seamless customer experiences.

Here are some of the innovative solutions that will help modernize your billing process, available to utilities today:

Online Payment Portal
An online portal creates a central location for your customers to review their billing details. By integrating secure payment processing and consolidating transactions from multiple sources, utilities benefit from a 360 view of accounts to serve customers better.

Additionally, instant payment processing can shorten your days-to-pay while offering real-time data and visibility on payment metrics.

Focus on Data
Accurate, accessible data is the backbone of billing automation. Maintaining up-to-date customer information reduces costly errors, improves compliance, and enables hyper-personalization to enhance engagement through supplementary account-related messaging and marketing.

Conduct a Design Audit
Well-designed billing statements are more powerful than you might think. If customers struggle to understand how much they owe, it creates a frustrating experience.

Reviewing payment trends, customer service call logs, and your suite of statement communications can help identify the source of confusion. By redesigning statements with clarity in mind, you reduce call volumes, alleviate some of the burden on your staff, and empower your customers to troubleshoot payment issues on their own.

Explore Interactive Video
Let’s be honest, billing statements aren’t the most exciting communications. But engagement is still so important! And since people process information in diverse ways, interactive video can contribute to positive customer information retention, which you can use to complement your billing communication strategy.

Interactive videos can explain billing calculations, highlight usage trends, and communicate rate changes and charges with clarity. These videos can even be personalized and tailored to the communication objective or customer profile.

Enable One-Off Digital Documents
There may be instances where one-off, statement-related documents need to be delivered to customers and, in some cases, signed and returned.

In situations where an online portal isn’t available, secure document delivery via email is a great option. You can include personal information, links to a payment form with a third party, and interactive fields that allow customers to fill in personal details and an e-signature.

Outsource your customer communications management (CCM) operations
The proliferation of digital channels has created a world of possibilities for service providers and their customers. But there’s still a massive appetite for printed documents, especially when it comes to paying bills. For many, having a physical bill in hand serves as a reminder of their payment obligations.

Offering both digital and print channels for billing can improve engagement, and that’s the goal of a truly omnichannel experience. However, relying on in-house operations to supplement your e-billing distribution can be a burden on staff, internal operations, and budget.

By outsourcing your print operations to a full-service communications provider, you’ll not only benefit from streamlined printing and mail workflows, but you’ll also tap into expert advice on how to best integrate print and mail in your digital strategy.

The Customer is at the Heart of Billing Modernization

Billing modernization is about delivering the experience customers expect. Listen to your customers, talk to your internal teams, and take note of areas of your operations that need improvement.

To modernize your billing process, ask yourself:

• What makes life easier for you and the modern utility customer?
• What creates unnecessary friction?
• How can your utility replicate the experiences customers value most?

By answering these questions, you’ll uncover opportunities to transform your billing and deliver true value to your customers.