Your Only Scheduled Appointment

The bill is your only scheduled appointment with your customer. Make the most of it by giving him a reason to continue being your customer after he reads it. Cross-selling new products and offering rewards on the bill's summary page can be an effective way to reduce churn.

Each time one of your customers opens the paper or electronic mailbox to retrieve your bill, it could be a successful sales call if your billing-system architecture has been properly designed. If you have confused or angered him with something in the bill, he will call you with a complaint or a question. He rarely calls with compliments. If your customer does not feel motivated to stay with you after reading and paying the bill, then there's a good chance he will seriously consider one of the competitive offers he constantly receives.

LEARN BY OBSERVATION Leaders in the credit-card industry have used techniques perfected in the airline industry to reduce churn successfully and improve profits by using bills to deliver loyalty rewards and cross-selling offers. These programs are finding their way into the wireless industry. Recent advances in client-server-based software now make it possible to produce bills with personalized loyalty rewards and product offers without replacing or significantly upgrading existing billing systems.

When you examine other industries, the elements that contribute to success are the same. They use sophisticated marketing databases to segment their customer base into small groups, with each group receiving a slightly different reward set. They create and maintain a sense of anticipation in the customer's mind by frequently communicating the reward's status, and they give rewards that are useful to a typical customer's lifestyle. They also send the reward in the mail rather than making the customer pick something out of a catalog.

BILL REDESIGN The bill's summary page should be the primary message-delivery vehicle. First, the loyalty and product cross-selling messages ride for free in the bill. The cost of delivering this same message in a separate direct-mail letter is at least 40 cents when you add up costs for creative, project management, postage, paper, toner and ink. Also, read rate is high on this page; statistics show that placing an important message near the "amount due" field yields a 90% read rate.

One of the first steps in preparing your bill to carry 1-to-1 messages effectively is to redesign the format and make it concise and easy to read. When redesigning, plan for a multi- product converged bill now and allow space for all current and future products on the summary page, along with a box to display reward and cross-selling messages. Carriers soon will bill for a variety of services, such as Internet, cable and home security. By initially showing all products with $0 balance for the unused ones, you will generate interest in and attention to other products while adding intelligence to your billing system.

To turn your bill into an effective cross-selling and retention tool, first separate the calculation step from the formatting and rendering step. If you are on a mainframe or service-bureau system, someone already has spent a small fortune making sure the software does not grind to a halt on 1/1/2000, so don't make furthermodifications now. If you are on one of the new UNIX- or NT-based standalone systems, make sure you don't overload it with the additional work required to format personalized electronic and paper bills. Leave the existing billing systems alone, and let them act as calculation engines. Plan to enhance your bill by feeding billing data into a server that will function as a buffer between the calculation engines and your major customer-communications channels, which include bill printing, Internet servers and the call center. This buffering technique will let you intercept the billing datastreams from one or more systems. From there, you can combine and enhance them, produce a converged bill, and insert loyalty and revenue-building offers at no cost and high visibility.

MARKETING DATABASE Regardless of your billing system's age or its mode of operation, you will need a marketing database that breaks your customer base into small homogeneous groups. If you operate in a service-bureau mode or off of a legacy mainframe system, this database should be in a server downstream from the billing system. If you have one of the newer systems that already has a relational database manager, then there are probably hooks in the existing customer file where this data can reside. This database will hold summarized monthly spending at the product level for each customer for one to three years and be updated with revenues from each billing cycle. It also will be populated with customer demographics. These will permit targeted cross selling as well as exporting the profiles of your best customers to feed targeted direct-mail and telephone-based customer-acquisition programs.

Using data such as average monthly spending, segment churn rate and demographic lifestyle data, this database will calculate what to offer each customer and when to make the offer. These mathematically selected offers will be inserted into the billing output file before it passes to a separate server that will format it for paper and electronic presentment. Populating and segmenting this database, then seamlessly integrating it into the bill-production routine, will not be easy. However, if done properly, it could pay for itself in a matter of months through reduced churn and increased revenues.

Several new products have emerged in the e-commerce world. Service Central Technologies' Enterprise, a Web-based service-management solution, is available to wireless customer-service and repair teams. Sigma Systems launched WEBCARE, its Web-enabled customer self-care product. Similarly, Primal's most recent addition to its e-business solutions is WebCare. The solution allows you to maximize your Internet use for electronic billing, customer care and customer acquisition. Amdocs' new e-solution is called www.self.service, and NexCen Technologies announced it also will provide electronic customer-relationship-management solutions.

NCR introduced industrial-strength data warehousing to the Windows NT environment with its Teradata MPP Version launch.

Aptis and XACCT Technologies will jointly market convergent, usage-based IP billing solutions to wireless carriers. Integrating the XACCTusage system and the Aptis ICP business-support software modules allows carriers to bill for IP service as they would for any switch-based service. Sigma Systems Group also will integrate XACCTusage into its end-to-end billing and operations-support-systems solutions. In turn, XACCT will offer Sigma's billing and customer-care (BCC) solution to its customers.

Intasys agreed to integrate Primal Systems' Outfront product, a back-office customer-intelligence and management solution, with its Jbill BCC system. Davinci Technologies, an EBPP provider, joined the Phone.com Alliance Program to accelerate customer care and customized-information delivery to wireless handsets.

TSR Wireless agreed to deploy pagePRO's entire product suite for its resellers and direct and retail customers. Customers can view account information and pay bills on-line.