As a utility provider – whether in the water, sewerage, electricity, gas or telecom industry – reducing costs, finding ways to become more efficient and embracing technology is key to improving the customer experience (CX) and meeting the demands of the 21st century customer.
Did you know, that embracing a customer portal that allows your company to integrate eBilling can help you do just that?
In fact, eBilling can help your utility improve the customer experience, reduce costs and paper usage, lessen the strain on your employees, automate billing data, improve customer engagement and much more.
So, what is eBilling?
EBilling, otherwise known as paperless billing, epayments or einvoicing, is the simple process of receiving, paying and keeping track of bills online. These bills are digitally generated by a computer software and then sent out to utility customers through a customer portal.
By giving customers the ability to view their utility bills on any device, whether it be a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone, customers will be able to pay their bills from anywhere and at any time.
How can paperless billing benefit my utility?
Historically bills have been delivered through the mail, but eBilling is a way of automating this process – allowing your utility to reduce error rates, save time, cut costs and improve your operational efficiencies.
SilverBlaze has made a list of the key benefits that your utility will realize from implementing an eBilling platform:
System of record: Traditional billing methods rely heavily on paperwork and manual checks, meaning it can be extremely difficult to create a system which organizes and saves historic data. EbIlling, however, will create a system of record (SOR) for both your utility company and your customer. With ebilling integrated into your utility customer portal and the ability to keep a clean and organized SOR, both your company and your customer will have access to historic bills.
Employees can focus on higher-value tasks: The process of manual billing is incredibly time-consuming. It involves data entry, invoice generation, putting bills in envelopes, mailing envelopes, chasing payments and much more. By reducing labour on monotonous tasks, you will free you staff up to work on more important tasks that offer a higher-value to both your business and your customers.
Reduction in error rates: The shift from paper-based to electronic bills and an automated system inherently creates better organization and results in significantly fewer errors.
Speed up your revenue cycle: Sending bills by mail is slow, and that means it can take customers a significant amount of time to send payments to your billing department. By giving customers immediate access to their bills through a customer portal, not only is this easier to organize for your company but a fast turnaround on billing will also result in improved revenue cycles.
Reduction in costs: By encouraging your customers to use eBilling, you will be able to reduce the costs of printing and mailing out physical bills as well save money by avoiding expenses related to lost or misplaced bills due to mail delivery issues or postage strikes and tracking down delinquent payments.
What’s the best way for your utility to include ebilling as part of your service?
By partnering with an innovative software development and consultancy firm that specializes in providing technology to the utility sector, such as SilverBlaze, you will be able to implement a one-stop-shop customer portal that integrates world-class technologies such as eBilling. In turn, this will significantly improve your customer experience.
Our award-winning utility customer portal offers exceptional convenience and a variety of features for utility billing and payments. Customers have access to ebilling and online payment functionality every day of the year, and they can resolve most billing questions themselves, by viewing their account activity and usage information online – in real time.
Through our incredibly easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate design, we ensure that not only do customers highly enjoy using your utility’s customer portal but that your utility is able to capture a true return on investment (ROI) and deliver real benefits to your customers.
Want to learn more about how our customer portal can transform your utility’s billing processes? Contact the SilverBlaze team of experts today for more information, we would be more than happy to help.
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