The term “Sexy Billing” was first coined by Darran Clem of Telesperience (in fact Darran coined the twitter hashtag #sexybilling) in response to this post where Teresa Cottam complains that telecommunications billing wasn’t seen as sexy, but that it should be. At first it just made me laugh. But then I began to think – why was that? I have devoted several years of my life to working on and thinking about billing in telecommunications (and elsewhere) – why would I do that if I didn’t think it was sexy in some respect? What would it mean for billing to be sexy? In fact what does it mean to say that a topic is “sexy”? We don’t mean we are sexually attracted to it (I hope)! Instead, when we say that something like a car is sexy, we mean that it is glamourous, it’s attractive, that when we are involved with it we are filled with a sense of delight. Pondering this, I realised that many of the core aspects of billing aren’t sexy. Those hard issues around rating algorithms, trade-offs between the performance and reliability, processing vast numbers of transactions, integration with the demands of customer relationship management, finance and business intelligence systems are just that – hard, and not intrinsically exciting. However, the experiences that billing gives rise to can be sexy – that is they can be the kind of experiences that customers, management and internal staff want to have and be associated with. Now, they often aren’t sexy – but they could be and should be! So here is my take on what sexy billing might look like.
Sexy billing is first and foremost about delighting your customers. If you delight your customers, then everyone within your organisation will want to be seen with you! Now, no-one is delighted about having to pay a bill, but the experience of being billed and making payments can be made as delightful as possible by attending to some key factors. Firstly the way that products work must be simple and transparent. If the customer understands what they are paying for, how much they are paying for it, and the value they get, then they are more likely to be happy with receiving a bill for it. Secondly, billing must be accurate and timely. If there are no mistakes on the bill then this builds up trust between the service provider and the customer rather than them viewing the arrival of their bill with fear and trepidation. Thirdly, your bill must be clear and available to the customer via their channel of choice. A clearly summarised bill allows a customer who trusts you to avoid having to look at the detail of every phone call and when the details are clearly presented you avoid confusing customers over what they have been billed and why. Delivering bills to a customer via the most channel most convenient to them is always going to make them happier. Lastly, give the customer plenty of payment options so that they can choose the one most convenient for them.
Billing that delights customers also delights marketers! Beyond that, however, marketers and product managers want a rich set of billing capabilities that are flexible: they want a wide range of different billing constructs that are able to be combined to allow them to create those innovative new offers that will differentiate them from the competition. They also want the ability to launch new products and offers in record time. Time to market is crucial in a competitive environment, and when billing is the quickest area in going from concept to market, billing will be seen as sexy. Marketers also want accurate and timely information about the success of their campaigns. The basic measure of success of a service provider’s marketing campaign is revenue. You tell that by looking at how much money customers are spending, and you find that out from your billing systems. Billing that can provide detailed, quality information on customer behaviour quickly will delight your marketing teams.
High quality billing information will also delight executives and senior management. Clear information about what you are billing and how much will allow them to understand their current position and will enable higher quality decision making. They will also be delighted with billing that does not under-bill (thus reducing revenues) or over-bill (thus creating ill-will and perhaps encouraging regulation), and they will definitely be delighted with billing that is cheap to operate!
The last key group that should be delighted with sexy billing are your operations teams. These are the dedicated individuals who keep billing running, who perform all of the billing processes and who support the running of the billing systems. Sexy billing delights the operations teams by being easy to run, reliable and transparent. Operational staff want automation if it adds efficiency, but includes enough flexibility to accommodate different styles of working and the different needs of various business units. They want user interfaces that make their jobs easier, not harder. They want processes and systems that are reliable, repeatable, efficient and effective. They want to be able to implement changes quickly and have operations continue without a hiccup. If you have all of that, then billing will be seen as an attractive place to work and a glamorous one to be associated with.
When we achieve all of this, when billing delights customers, marketers, executives and operations teams, then billing will indeed become sexy. Billing will be the glamorous, attractive guest at the party that people are delighted by and will want to be with. And if this is what sexy billing looks like we are immediately faced with two new questions: why isn’t billing sexy today? And, how do we make billing sexy? Good questions, and good topics for other posts!
This blog post is a part of the blogfest BOSSfest11 run by Telesperience.
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