Article Comment: Redesigning the Telecom Australia (Telstra) Bill

09 November 2005

Link: The Telecom Bill - CRIA case history #1

This article describes how the Communication Research Institute of Australia (CRIA) redesigned the bill format, layout and approach for Telecom Australia's general telecommunications bill from its existing design with small pages that used 'telco-centric' wording, to one that used larger A4 sheets, colour and customer focused phrasing. (Telecom Australia is now known as Telstra.)

The points to note from the article include:

• The bill provides the primary document in the relationship between billers and their customers.
• A body of research exists on document design that can be used ahead of starting from scratch.
• The (re)design's specific aims must be specified up front so that testing can optimise along those measures.
• Document (re)design performed 'by committee' rather than through a tested approach can lead to the billing equivalent of a 'camel' that is unlikely to deliver on the aims of the project.
• Multiple (re)design iterations within the project allowed changes to be tested and measurably improved against the existing bill and earlier prototypes.
• Colour, graphic design, typography and language each contributed to improving the new bill's design. For example, colour provided visual clues to key information such as the amount payable and the due date, and the bill's language was modified to speak using terms 'customers' understood rather than those common to the Telco's network engineers, lawyers or regulators.

Outcome:

• Billing dissatisfaction dropped by more than half,
• Approximately 70% of customers thought the new bill design was 'much better' than the old one,
• Overall satisfaction of Telecom's billing service increased from 67% to 84%, and
• Only 4% of customers listed the bill as a cause of dissatisfaction (down from 47%).

The bill redesign outlined in this article was performed in 1988, but subsequent redesigns of that early design have evolved the bill to the format Telstra uses today.

Tags: Billing, Document Design, Testing, Customer Satisfaction