The Unseen Customer Burden: Navigating a Labyrinth of Company Websites and Payment Options

While developing the Cubby Paperless service, I gained a significant insight: companies often limit their customer-centric thinking to their own website. They meticulously craft customer portals, striving for ease of use, yet overlook a crucial reality: their customers interact with countless other company websites as well. This fragmented digital landscape leads to widespread customer confusion, forcing them to recall diverse login procedures, navigate disparate page layouts, and decipher unique button placements for each company's specific tasks.

This disparity becomes particularly glaring when customers attempt to retrieve essential documents like monthly paperless bills or statements from each company. Cubby directly addresses this pain point by centralizing these documents from various companies, offering customers a single, streamlined login experience.

Beyond document retrieval, the payment process presents a similar, often unacknowledged, challenge. Many companies proudly advertise a plethora of payment options – credit card, direct withdrawal, PayPal®, and more. However, from the customer's perspective, this translates into a confusing array of choices for each biller, with every company offering a different subset of available methods.

Consider the sheer variety of payment options customers might encounter:

• Apple Pay®
• Autopay
• Bank's bill pay portal
• Biller's mobile app
• Biller's online payment portal
• Cash
• Check
• Checking account withdrawal
• Credit card
• Cryptocurrency
• Debit card
• Google Pay®
• PayPal®
• Texting
• Third-party portal
• Venmo®
• Zelle®

Customers are left in a constant state of mental recall: "I paid this bill this way, that bill that way, or was it the other way?" This cognitive load makes verifying bill payments a significant hurdle, potentially leading to undesirable outcomes. Late payments, which neither companies nor customers want, become a real risk. Even worse, as Mike Porter noted in a LinkedIn post, double-payments can occur:

My wife and I have accidentally paid a bill twice - each of us using a different payment method, thinking the other had forgotten to pay. Things can get confusing.

Imagine a customer managing 15 monthly bills, even if they only utilize five of the payment methods listed above. Remembering which of those five was used for each individual bill becomes an almost impossible task.

I confess, I don't have a universal answer for this pervasive problem. Do you?

Image generated by Gemini.