Streamline Your Workflow in the Invoice for Customer Support

In the invoice for Customer Support

we've tried to solve the issues of why customers call in and when we send out tens of thousands of bills you want to avoid having tens of thousands of phone calls of course so really looking at the layout the data that's on that layout and in that design and how it's shown to the customer really can make a big difference as to those Peaks and valleys of the phone calls the call center is going to get well hello everybody Welcome to direct Works let's be direct podcast number two my name is Dan shotlander and today we're going to talk a little bit about how invoice layouts can reduce customer service calls so we're kind of changing gears from our traditional DM talk points and moving over to transactional another line of business the direct Works offers so this really means bills statements notices they tend to be more financial in nature and we're going to talk a little bit on how to make these documents more user-friendly for both the biller and the recipient so today we have special guest Daryl Chandler welcome Daryl thank you Dan uh Daryl has a wealth of experience he's formally and or currently Consulting with major Telecom Brands and dozens of smaller operators and all things billing systems and including the all-important build layout and content which we're going to talk a little bit about today so yes Daryl Daryl and I have had the pleasure of collaborating uh over the last 15 years on a whole bunch of different projects relating to transactional bills statements notices uh really pulling upon each other's knowledge on how to execute ideas that make bills better and on how to how to basically make them a more user-friendly touch point Daryl started out with us uh about 15 years ago as the operations manager at a cable company which was later acquired by a major brand and since then he's gone out on his own and is now Consulting with those same major telecom companies on all things customer information and billing systems he's a true customer billing systems and builds design layout Pro um so yeah really to jump into it here obviously there's there's a whole lot of a lot of things you can do with your bill if you think about it a little bit and we really got pushed into that because we we all receive bills and and we actually print mail bills for customers that do more to confuse or even frustrate rather than inform and inform and simplify for the customer so I thought we'd start with the story of how we ended up working together on a specific case study uh how how the rethink of a bill layout was instrumental uh to making this this whole billing process a much more simple exchange between your customers your your your uh your internal users and basically turning it into a a very much more enjoyable process overall as as enjoyable as a bill can be yes so thanks Dan for having me um you inviting me on you know brings back memories even before we talk about layout of how we used to do our bills and how you solved um the issue of having to print them in-house for us and we'd come in in the mornings and uh the person working overnight maybe left the toner empty or put the paper in backwards or reversed and we'd have all these issues so even just having direct Works handle the bills in general has been a great step up but yeah we we've been through several building system changes um design layouts together and it was always about making it actually easier for the customer but also for our own staff we've tried to solve the issues of why customers call in and when we send out tens of thousands of bills you want to avoid having tens of thousands of phone calls of course so really looking at the layout the data that's on that layout and in that design and how it's shown to the customer really can make a big difference as to those Peaks and valleys of the phone calls the call center is going to get as we do billing so that is definitely uh the main reason we we got to work together on this and we've gone through a different a few different revisions and we keep improving uh which you know as time goes on and as companies offer different products different Services different ways of billing and different ways customers can pay it's really made a big difference to modify that layout to be more concise and easier for customers to understand absolutely absolutely well maybe what we can do is actually cast back to that time when we first started working together there was a major project at your end and it was really exactly speaks to exactly what you're talking about it was all about this can't continue the madness has got to stop kind of thing maybe you can describe a little bit of you know why your customers were calling and how that was how that was really becoming a major issue for you folks yeah absolutely uh so the the first project as you mentioned a major project was a billing system change so obviously lots of things happening there account numbers changing um and it was for a cable company so of course there's devices and people are not only just watching cable at this point back in 2000 five or six but I'm getting into internet we're starting to do phones so lots of different types of businesses lines of business or product Types on the bill and the old way the old system it kind of spit out like a typewriter did it like someone sat there with a cue card and just typed out the transactions just put them on a big list and that could be confusing for customers we would sell maybe a product at one price but then the system spit it out differently right or was configured differently so what that first major project involved you know changing the billing system and getting better data out of the billing system so the invoice is only going to look as good as the data you can provide your provider like direct Works to create that bill so that was the first major project we did and then we took a look at the layout and that's what we started looking at all right what does the Billing System provide we start with that on day one and then we started looking at wire customers calling they're calling in because they can't decipher in the way that we're presenting the bill today when they make a change why and and we all love I'm sure prorates or the term proration uh so you call in the middle of the month when it's a subscription service and make a change we want to charge you the difference for what you've done uh sometimes it's in the company's favor because it's a higher charge and sometimes it's a downgrade it's a lower charge but either way there's a pro rate so there's a lot of confusion or uh it was it's not easy to tell what those charges were there's also installation fees one-time charges service fees that kind of stuff that would all be grouped in there as well as other usage fees again going back maybe 15 years ago it was somewhat popular to charge for usage after a certain amount when it comes to internet services and then even today you've got long distance calls and stuff from from phone products so you know having all those usage fees just in a list of transactions with all the monthly fees made it hard for the customer to understand what is my monthly rate that I subscribe to and what am I paying over and above that because of these other fees charges usage that's being applied to my bill so a lot of confusion over the total you know just very high level example we sell something for 150 dollars but the bill is 222. okay list of transactions that would drive calls into the call center because someone would want uh someone to explain all those charges to them and sometimes you get someone on the phone that also can't explain what those charges are and I think we've all been in that scenario before and it's it can be frustrating as a customer of course to say well you provided this bill what do you mean you can't explain it or we need to escalate it we need to create a ticket and we have to go in this Loop of waiting and waiting for people to call us back so that was definitely one of the major pain points was how to understand the bill why the amount is why the way it is and then also the due dates uh became a high pain point for the call center sometimes people are on pre-authorized payments but we'd still send them to build on with a due date um maybe we would send a paper bill out and even though they Auto remit payments to us already we give them a business return envelope a reply envelope in the bill so there's some economies or efficiencies we could get as well from the bear layout and also not confuse the customer with extra data or dates that don't apply to them yeah why are you sending me an envelope and I pay online should I yeah you know have we canceled the pay online thing what's going on let's call and find out right right yeah exactly yeah I think I think we've all experienced that with bills some of those some of those issues and you know working on ways to to improve our relationship and our brand with our customer in so many other areas these organizations or organizations ourselves included you know we want to have a premier customer experience for our customers but we're not delivering it when it comes to the bill and really when we got to that point and you came in and walked in it was gosh it must have been like 2008 or something like that when we in that major change occurred and and really you did really it was it really did come down to how are we grouping things on our bill how are we summarizing things uh that's just not working we're getting calls about about this proration was a huge problem and then you know how do I pay this bill those are really the the three kind of big or two or three big big problems if you if you if you recall that conversation it was uh and you know one thing I'd like to interject there is that ever since that conversation with every other customer who we engage with one of the first questions I asked is is why are your customers calling in a few days after your billing cycle goes out right let's talk about what the Real Pain points are there yeah there's always uh some people just like to talk so you'll never remove all the calls but um yes absolutely it's great to to you know like I said we get these Peaks and valleys in a call center it's hard to staff when two or three days out of the month you're gonna get 90 of your calls right so other operator that are larger we'll do multi-cycle billing and spread that out but yeah the the small to medium operator uh once a month billing makes sense full calendar months and it's about Staffing for those couple days of inflex of calls right or or not having to staff them if as much if you have a bill that is simple and you know one thing I also it's one thing also to mention is that there are statistics that show a bill that's well understood gets paid up to 25 quicker because quite often what will happen is a customer doesn't understand something or some aspect of their bill well they're not going to pay it until they understand so well I don't have time to call right now the bill sits for maybe a week or two and then they finally get around to to doing something with it right so honestly there's just so many so many uh advantages to to focusing a little bit on that whole layout you know we can talk about marketing on the bill and and specific messaging and driving new revenue streams in a whole other podcast but maybe you can let's let's drill into a little bit what did we do and how did we solve these things with the ocean sure yeah uh when it comes to layout and doing that kind of phase two right we switched systems we got you a lot more data so we got more data out of the system that we could actually work with in a raw format instead of just a list of transactions and so we were able to play around a bit more and actually start doing groupings of transactions I think that was one of the things that really helped as soon as we started selling multiple products was here's your internet charges for example here's your cable TV charges and here's your phone charges so even just a simple grouping of those three products and maybe other things that came along too and and promotions and adjustments all could be separated so even right on the front page of the bill just giving a high level summary of each of those products here's what your internet costs today here's or this month and your cable and your phone and then their you know taxes and the total right on the front high level summary per product and people understood what they were paying for yeah on the back yeah if they wanted to drill in they can go to the back and look and they would go to the back yeah and not and not producing a lot of uh stereotype maybe of telcos cable codes we love to Bill uh we may not do it right but we love to build so getting an 80 page or 100 page Bill uh maybe isn't uncommon but we really wanted to solve that issue we didn't want to send out huge bills uh so keeping it concise um you know not using a font that's too small but also not having to separate everything into one page for service uh stops people from having to flip through the pages and say oh this charge is on page 17 and trying to find it right so that back or the page two and an additional if needed you know even doing a two column format saved us saved some money but it also makes it easier for the customer just to see everything at a glance yeah you can actually use some white space and and like you said the columns and some color to draw the eye to certain aspects of the bill and emphasize that yeah what are the cool things that you mentioned though I want to Circle back is that summary piece and not only summarizing what the charges are but how much is all old within that whole block so here's your summary here's what you here's here's where it all came from at high level here's what you paid last month here's what's left over or or are you still low or overpaid and here's what you actually owe now all in one spot and what's cool about that though is that with uh with the um the growth of e-billing you know we can now take that information and put that right on the um right on the on the in the body of the e-bill too so they can you can attach the you can attach the the bill that has all of the more extended information but even if you wanted to you could put those that summary information right on the body of the bill and at least it's it's all right easy for the customer to see at a glance right and maybe to your point about bills being paid quicker when someone sees an amount and they're the type of person that likes to pay a bill as soon as they get it they're not even opening the bill I'm not suggesting people shouldn't open the bill because we've got lots of nice cool things in the bell too that we want them to see and maybe upgrade but yeah uh Hey the fact that they see an amount and a due date and they make a payment uh is a benefit to everyone when that happens it's golden so yeah I think thanks for bringing that up too like that summary on the front balance forward the summary and then the total uh something else we added underneath that right under that summary is account specific details as far as their due date based on are they an auto pay customer are we going to pre do they have a pre-authorized credit card or checking account that we're going to take a payment from or are they actually are in arrears so we use the very next section under that summary and that total dude to explain hey we're going to take the payment on this date or you need to pay us by the state or by the way you're overdue and this is your due date but we change colors and we use different font colors and sizes to highlight that to make it really obvious and draw their eye to anything very specific we want to highlight to them that's really important as far as payment goes especially yeah exactly yeah what do I pay and when yeah exactly maybe if I can just go back to uh so we have the summary on the front what we did on the back to help with the understanding we talked about prorates a little bit ago um you know people upgrade they downgrade they want that flexibility I want this Channel or I want a different speed and it's always you know it tends to be a billing uh confusion or maybe nightmare I hate to use that word but um so one thing we improved upon was that separate from the monthly amounts if you were to change your internet speed for example we kept it in the internet section or that grouping but we highlighted first saying here's the changes you made since your last bill and we used icons we used color to show here's what you added and here's what you removed and we used clear dates to show what date you made that change on and that's why you're seeing a credit for the old service and a charge for the new service that gets subtotaled and then the very next section uh we're showing the monthly charges again so now they can clearly see well here's my normal monthly amount for this new service or the changes I've made and up above that they can see the credits and charges and prorates uh that affect their total for this bill so I think that was very helpful in reducing call volume is splitting out any changes they make versus what their normal monthly is going forward absolutely and the beauty of that is with today's technology and the use of color is much more easy uh easily done than it ever was in the past it's more cost effective it's you know it's not like if you go to Black you're going to save you know 400 percent of the cost of going to color for this variable information uh you know there are Technologies inkjet Technologies specifically that they've addressed this perfectly and are actually environmentally environmentally a lot cooler than using black toner right right where you're generating a lot less heat and energy yeah to do that but yeah so so yeah that's awesome and what else did yeah yeah if we go back even we were talking a little bit about usage charges so um again it's kind of gone away which is great for the consumer we don't really charge a lot of Internet overages these days it's often an unlimited plan or a speed throttle plan uh but phone is a good example of maybe international calling is always going to be chargeable or 4-1-1 in those types of services so having those on the bill before it just has another chain transaction as part of the grand total just inflated that bill it made it look like every month I'm going to be spending this much when that really wasn't the case yeah so again yeah keeping those groupings on the on the back or in the subsequent pages that we talked about we've got our Pro rates we've got our monthly charges then we've got our one-time usage uh again just separated in that grouping it shows that this is one time for this specific month it's added to your total but it's just completely separate from the monthly charges really I think and I've said it maybe 12 times now but I was really keen on having a monthly charge shown that shows them what their normal monthly rate is on all these groupings everything else is above and below as a one-time thing for this particular bill so right separating out long distance pay-per-view movie purchases VOD that kind of stuff video on demand sure I mean it could be and it could be any in any industry I think that the principles are the same you know you want to be respectful to your customer and in some regards you can almost say that the way the bills were being presented on in in the case of when we originally endeavored work on your on your project it was it was absolutely a disrespectful bill it was it was you know you couldn't you could literally not even pick up a calculator and figure out exactly what was happening and so obviously that was a pain point for for the customer service department as well as the customers right yeah good point as uh making it easier for the customer ideally makes it easier for your own staff as well when they have to answer the call and explain the bill and another great part of what we do with this new layout and this new bill is we give the exact Bill to the customer service agents that need to answer the questions from the customers so back into the Billing System they can pull up the exact bill the customer is looking at and they're not just looking at a list of transactions they're seeing exactly uh all the improvements we've just been talking about so yeah that makes it easier to answer yeah that's not really not even a layout thing but it's just a common sense workflow right I mean you got to make sure that you're looking at the same thing that your customers seeing yeah those calls right yeah we've all had those calls we call call in somewhere and they have no idea what we're looking at we're like well on page seven it says this and the person doesn't know what you're talking about right exactly so really I guess to to what we what we did maybe not knowingly back then is we we really produced a a best practices kind of approach and you know involving a little bit of Consulting back and forth asking the right questions of your customer service who's calling why are they calling we went ahead and you know I think if I'm if I'm hearing you correctly the biggest thing that the biggest two or three items that we had to check off that list to make this a much better process was you know putting grouping things together and summarizing them on the front of the bill get that high level whether it's you know categories of product types or service types put those all together then summarize exactly how to pay when to pay very clear get that on the front use some white space as I said we've talked about we can talk about some other other messaging on the bill messaging is a whole other like I said it's a whole other conversation but relating to the layout at least using at least using appropriate colors to draw the eye you know knowing when the due date is is is going to be as huge for for these situations especially if you're you've got new new customers and it's a subscription type right that's that's where it starts to become a little more confusing for them and then using uh and then basically with with the even with the payment stub we did quite a bit with that where typically a bill will have either the top or at the bottom will have a payment stuff and we actually made the data on that variable and basically looked at how they pay what we know about how they pay and then make sure the messaging on that itself is is reflective of their typical payment type right yeah great example someone has a credit balance instead of giving a remit slip that's asking how much are they in closing we actually say Do not no payment required or something very easy for someone to understand oh I don't have to send a payment you don't have to tell me twice right now I'm not sending a payment uh so yeah there's all sorts of components of the bill that are Dynamic that are looking at things on the customer even from are they paper or email right so for sending a paper Bill we're trying to prompt them to sign up for email billing and if they're not on auto payments the back of that permit has a pre-authorization form that they can sign up for those payments so if they're sending it back anyway with their payment maybe they'll sign up for pre-authorized payments so right right a gentle nudge right yeah and it's it's on every bill so they don't have to call and ask for the form yeah they don't have to go online if maybe they happen to not have internet service where they are at the time or they don't want to use their phone plan it's on the bill so yeah lots of different things there that have improved the need to contact the company or the customer service department for some things right and I think like like we were saying it just comes down to if you were the customer and you wanted to understand this bill as well as the billing person that you're talking to with customer service sorry building person at the other end you know what would you do right what would what would you do to to clarify and compartmentalize and emphasize those key areas and that will be different from customer to customer and coming out of different cis's uh how you how you use that but I think the principles are all the same at the end of the day right I mean you it's about making it a a very clear concise process for the customer yeah I think at the end of the day it comes down to use especially for subscription Services uh you sell a product at a certain price and anytime it's not exactly that price you want very clear information as to why it's that way why is it higher why is it lower and right avoid the phone call with the question just put the it comes down to your data as well layouts of course what we're talking about are very important but the layout can only handle what data you send into that layout to for it to present right so providing that data and the way that we've separated it from again I think the key is the monthly Services has really helped with call center operations yeah for sure for sure yeah and there are some really cool things that you can do to emphasize those changes ads and deletions using color and icons that again draw that eye in and just make Clarity a priority on your bill right great well listen I I really appreciate your time Daryl it's been a pleasure working with you and thank you for coming in and thanks to everybody for taking a few minutes to have a listen to uh how invoice layouts can reduce customer service calls uh this is the the let's be direct podcast number two my name is Dan shotlander have a great day and we will uh we will be in touch thanks Daryl thank you thank you