Article Comment: Using billing to reduce the personal impact when disasters strike

01 September 2005

The US Postal Service (USPS) has delayed or stopped their deliveries to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Billing can assist those affected by not sending new bills, and by modifying the credit management of people whose services may not be paid due to their relocation and/or personal loss.

The first step in your business' response will require the identification of several overlapping customer segments (lists) extracted from the biller's databases. The initial lists may use loose (broad) criteria that assume more people are impacted than reality. As additional time is available and a disaster's scope is better understood, these lists can be refined to target just those actually affected. Initially identifying and subsequently administering these lists may need supplemental staffing, possibly around the clock in the early days, whilst the remainder of your business continues to operate on a business-as-usual basis.

With these lists in hand, billing could assist in areas such as:

• New bill production - Identify customers' accounts by ZIP/postal code, state or other criteria and delay starting their bill production. This may require the delay of only a subset of a much larger billing run be deferred. These customers are unlikely to receive their bills if deliveries are stopped. Once deliveries are resumed, these customers could be extracted in the next billing run for normal processing.
• Bills just posted - Identify those bills that were just posted or that have already been extracted and proactively defer their collection, at least in the short term. Once the impact is better understood the collection policy can be targeted to just the impacted parties. Customers mildly impacted could have their due date deferred by a few days to a week.
• Credit management - Impacted customers may not be able to contact their financial institutions, know their account numbers ('my bill was washed away with the house'), or be available to receive their reminder notices (relocated, no house to deliver to). The same list used to identify those impacted could be used for outbound calling to reassure customers that payment is suspended over the short / medium term.
• Service disconnections - For many billers disconnection will be a moot point (i.e. electricity, gas). But for networks such as mobile (cell) phones, service disconnection will be an additional point of stress when it is least appreciated. Customers may need to contact, or be contacted by, family and friends to notify them that they are safe and well. If customers have been relocated then their mobile phone service may be the only method by which customers can be contacted by relief organisations and reorganise their lives back into some form of normality.
• Location specific rate plans - Charges may be waived, suspended or reduced for a limited period of time to reflect the impact on customers' and your business' inability to deliver service and / or your customers' ability to use billable services. At possibly the worst time of their life, what will your customers remember about your approach?
• Destination specific rate plans - A broader plan where calls 'to' impacted customers are charged at reduced rates or waived for a short period. (telco specific)
• Impact notification - If customers are impacted by delays in delivery, do you know enough to inform the 'sender' that they are impacted? This may be specific for distribution businesses (e.g. Fedex), but it may apply in other industries.
• New customers from affected areas - Develop a plan for how your business will respond if new customers apply from within the disaster zone. (This may occur if businesses without a plan treat them badly.)

Whilst this planning may not assist a current disaster, it will provide assistance when the next one occurs. Hurricanes (cyclones, tornadoes), earthquakes, floods, landslides, droughts, hail storms, bush fires, snow storms, ice storms, or disease outbreaks might never occur in your part of the world, but they might occur where your customers live.

These plans will support the people who are impacted by disasters, will allow a biller's staff to feel that they are helping, will build good will from their current (and presumably future) customers, and will save the biller money by allowing them to focus their assistance where it matters and avoid ineffective actions that cost money (postage, collections).

Tags: Billing, Disaster, Planning, Assistance