Note 60: Contact Channels

Posted: 14 January 2009

Customers can inquire on their billing details using a wide variety of channels including phone, mail, fax, email and more recently through self-service portals (e.g. kiosks, via the internet). The cost of answering customer inquiries through each channel varies dramatically from the high cost of calls answered in person to the much cheaper inquiries self-serviced by customers across the internet. The channels used for making contact may be different to those used when customers pay their bills.

Customers may contact billers through channels such as:

In person: Where a biller has retail stores or points-of-presence, customers may make inquiries or request maintenance in person. Due to the skill level required of staff, this channel can be high cost where the inquiries or maintenance are complex (e.g. full service telecommunications), but can be the more appropriate when transactions are simple and the customer base is small (e.g. local government rates / taxes). The volume of transactions performed in person will be limited by the number of 'retail' locations, the availability of alternative channels, customers' geographic spread, and customers' willingness (and need) to make a physical journey to the biller.

By phone: Contact by phone is one of the easiest to perform for customers, but the lack of physical presence makes it harder for billers to confirm a customer's identity. Billers with high call volumes may require specialised call centres with separate staffing and IT infrastructure. Smaller billers may address calls using regular office staff.

Billers with high call volumes must address issues such as peak contact hours (differing by timezone), public holidays (by region or state), 24x7 support (if required), workload balancing (with overflow to other call centres), system and call centre outages (overflow, callback), skills per task (new connections, reconnections, special offers), customer languages, the experience levels of staff, and staff training. This channel can be one of the highest cost due to the staff and infrastructure involved, but for smaller billers this may still be a cost effective solution.

By physical mail: This may be a low volume channel relative to the number of customer contacts made by phone. Mail can be used for simple, well structured inquiry and maintenance requests that can be processed in batch with little or no customer contact. For example, a change of residential billing address for local government rates may be performed by post with just a signature. Where the customer's identity must be confirmed, a call from the biller to the customer may be required to confirm details.

Mail-based forms may be sent to a specific postal address to be worked upon by specialist teams, or be processed as they are received by the general customer service staff. Physical mail presents storage issues which may be addressed by document scanning and / or archival storage.

By fax: Contacts performed via fax have similar properties to physical mail with faster delivery, but suffer from a poorer image quality. Faxes may be used when written requests are required, but the delays of physical mail are unacceptable. For example, faxes may be used to exchange maintenance requests between a wholesale customer and their network provider (biller).

By email: Customers requests may be simple like those sent by physical mail, or complex ad-hoc details that must be clarified before action is taken. Like contacts made by phone, the biller must confirm the specific customer's identity before emailed transactions are actioned. Unlike mail, email has no physical presence, but may need to be backed-up and stored for a period of years to provide an audit trail.

Emailed transactions have an implied expectation of a prompt response, but an email's asynchronous nature can allow staff to address this work around their other workload. Larger billers may have specialised staff to address this channel.

A variation of this channel involves the capture of email-like inquiries from customers as they use the biller's internet portal. Billers can provide responses back to customers when they next use their portal account. The customers' identity does not have to be validated separately since only pre-authorised individuals can access accounts displayed on the internet portal.

By internet portal: Billers can use the low cost connectivity of the internet to provide customers access to their billing details and allow them to perform basic maintenance tasks. Using a portal, pre-registered customers can view their bill details, list their provisioned services, pay their bills, identify additional products to purchase, and initiate new connections. The self-service of a portal reduces the costs to the biller and allows customers to answer their own queries when convenient, but having a portal requires the biller maintain a 24x7 infrastructure. For larger billers, a portal approach can be appropriate, but for billers with simple bills, smaller customer numbers and/or with a less technical customer base, a portal may be an over-engineered solution.

Portals need to be user-friendly to support customer acceptance (take-up) and minimise the support costs of new users (e.g. assistance by phone). The list of functions a customer can perform may be limited to support this goal, with more complex functions still performed by biller staff.

Business-to-business (B2B) interface: Sophisticated billers, in conjunction with their larger customers, may develop interfaces that directly connect the systems of the biller with those of customers. The effect of this can be that inquiry and maintenance transactions entered in the customer's systems are conveyed to and executed by the biller without human intervention or the need for data reentry. This improves processing accuracy and speed, and helps improve data alignment between the biller and their customers.

For example, a real-time balance inquiry may be requested in the customer's system, relayed to the biller's billing system where the result is obtained, before being passed back and displayed on the customer's originating system. Real-time maintenance could also be performed in this way. The interface could also be used to pass batched requests to the biller for delayed processing, with the results passed back and reflected in the customer's system.

Such an interface can be complex to construct and maintain, requiring tight integration between IT systems with security, availability and trustworthiness being key considerations. An insecure interface will not be used due to the risk of private data becoming publicly accessible. An unstable or unavailable interface will not be trusted by the customer necessitating additional procedures that increase the costs to both the biller and customer. An untrustworthy interface will require additional reconciliation procedures that also increases costs.

One goal of such an interface is to become invisible enabling timely and cost-effective transaction processing for both the customer and biller. Another benefit can be to integrate so closely with the customer's operations that it would be difficult and costly to change providers (i.e. lock-in).

The need for sophisticated systems and staff to support such an interface means that only the biller and the biller's larger customers will gain sufficient benefits to offset the initial and ongoing costs involved. Wholesale customers, with their larger customer bases and separate billing systems, are strong candidates for such B2B interfaces. Smaller wholesale customers might use a specialised internet portal instead.

Tags: Billing, Customer, Contact, Inquiry, Cost Base