Every company wants to make more money and save more money. eBilling is another tool to allow you to save more money, not to mention the great customer relations aspects.
The key to making a true ROI is based on several factors:
- Is the acceptance of credit card payments going to cost you more than accepting a check?
- Can you drive electronic payers to lower payment options (such as ACH)?
- Are you really going to get paid faster?
- Can you get your customers to first, eliminate paper bills, invoices and statements; and second, get them to pay online?
- Always remember that there may be more incremental costs to a paper invoice than just the paper, envelopes and postage. Remember the human resources you employee and if you print yourself, all the equipment, rental space, down-time, etc.
So now that we see all the potential barriers to obtaining a true ROI for electronic billing and payments, let’s take a step back! Are we trying too hard? Every biller knows one thing: if customers don’t pay their bills, there’s no money coming in. So, most are content to receive bills any way they can. This makes sense! However, do you really believe your customers aren’t savvy enough to use online billing?
Amazon.com has are over 76 million customer accounts. These are people, (many of whom are the same who pay the bills for your customers), who are willing to place their credit cards and other personal forms of payment, on a website to buy “things”…”stuff”. They know how to pay online! By the way, do I need to also cite eBay statistics?! Offer incentives that also help your business. You know that people want things! They want things for free and if you don’t believe it, look at the millions of people who enter sweepstakes each year. You all have many customers who have been thinking about switching to electronic invoicing and/or payments.
Give them that little nudge…something for FREE! It could be the chance to win an iPad, or free music downloads, movie tickets, or even credit towards one of your services. Positive incentives, along with positive benefit statements do work. We all have heard the old adage, "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar". For that small investment, you may catch a lot of electronic “flies”! Easy does it! Consumers and businesses alike are in-tune with eBilling and ePayments. You need to make it easy for them to do both on your website…and through payment portals…and via their smartphones.
We all remember the “one-click” and it’s done. It’s never just one-click! That’s OK; just make sure enrollment and setup have as few steps as possible. Make it intuitive, make it easy…then take it easy!