No more pussyfootin'

It's time to stop playing nice with customers and make them pay their bills online.

Sure, it's usually a good idea to give customers plenty of choices in order to create that touchy-feely relationship everyone claims to be after. Service providers all like to say, "We let customers do business with us in whatever manner they want to." That's cute. It sounds so...I don't know, tolerant.

Sometimes you have to give customers a nudge. Sometimes you even need to slap them upside the head. Service providers are good at that when they want to be. They successfully forced the transition to touchtone service, broke customers of their habit of calling the operator with stupid questions, imposed 10-digit dialing, closed most of their payment centers and somehow got customers to take responsibility for the wiring inside their homes.

They need to do the same with electronic billing. The time has come.

Approximately 63 million people accessed the Internet via broadband connections in July. That means more than half of the people (51%--up from 38% in July of 2003) who use the Internet are "always connected." It is the industry's duty to give them something useful to do with that connectivity. Well, actually it's not, but it is high time service providers started putting a little more pressure on customers to get with the 21st century. Anyone tech-savvy enough to desire, establish, maintain and pay for a broadband connection and use it to order books from Amazon, concert tickets from TicketMaster, fake jewelry from Suzanne Somers and pornography from--well, I won't plug them here, but these people should have no qualms about online bill payment. In fact, they should no longer be given an alternative. They have access. They have e-mail. They have no excuse.

Despite the best efforts by service providers and financial institutions to promote good customer relationship management, most of them have missed the boat, according to a recent Yankee Group report, in part by not promoting more self-service options and online transactions.

If service providers are serious about cost-cutting, about being socially conscious (re: the environmental impact of paper billing, including deforestation, milling, transportation and the potentially toxic slime of millions of tons of gluey saliva oozing from the backs of stamps) and mean what they say about creating lasting, interactive relationships with their customers, they ought to implement mandatory electronic payment for all of their broadband users. It is the first step in creating an ongoing dialogue with customers that doesn't stem from them calling in with a complaint.

Sure there are security concerns. But if the Feds are serious about protecting the citizenry from evildoers, including those who would steal others' identities (a purported barrier to adoption for potential users of online transactions), then they ought to make identity theft punishable by death. Either that or make the thieves assume the identities of people even they would be embarrassed to be--a certain New Jersey governor, perhaps, or members of the U.S. Olympic basketball team?

Maybe that would be something for the telecom political action committees to promote in Washington this election season.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@primediabusiness.com