Entice Your Customers to Check eBills and Statements

Consumers say they want a better digital experience with their bills and statements, featuring more personalized summary information. Survey respondents specifically note a dislike for logging into numerous individual biller websites to obtain that info, according to the 2023 Digital Transformation and Next-Gen Tech Study conducted by Broadbridge Financial Solutions. The longing for personalized summaries rose to 74% from 61% in 2021.

When the digital experience is unsatisfactory, your customers may decide it’s not worth the effort to log in and view their regular digital communications from your company. You lose the ability to connect with customers via what could be a very effective communication channel.

When customers enable autopay, they are even less motivated to access their bills and statements via your online customer portal.

Sadly, targeted communication tactics implemented by companies can go unnoticed by customers. If they’re not receiving printed bills in the mail, these e-centric people tend to ignore the digital documents as well. For informational or promotional content to be impactful, people have to see the message. Otherwise, it won’t matter how enticing it is.

The Autopay/Transpromo Relationship

The number of consumers in the United States using autopay almost doubled between 2015 and 2020. This number continues to climb, reports the Wall Street Journal, which this past October cited data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Seven years ago, 35% of adult Americans were enrolled in some method of automatic bill payment. In 2023, more than 75 of every 100 consumers used autopay for at least one bill, notes financial-tech company Fiserv. That amounts to some 194 million adults.

How many of those autopay customers are reading their monthly statements (and the promotional or informational content they contain)?

For billers, enrolling customers in autopay has financial benefits, such as faster payment and better cash flow. But many companies work tirelessly to communicate their brands, including leveraging ROI via “transpromo” advertising within existing transaction-document channels.

The messages that appear on bills, statements, or invoices announcing new loyalty rewards or promoting upgrades, for example, will be missed by many autopay customers. They may believe accessing the documents has little value to them–especially when the process is inconvenient.

Imagine the impact on customer satisfaction when angry auto-payers call the customer service line, unhappy about unexpected higher utility bills caused by a “surprise” rate increase the company announced with statement messages a month ago!

Strategic-thinking firms that prefer to send variable-data messages to their constituents are on the right track. Customers are more likely to view messaging that is personalized and relevant to them. Personalization can become the reason customers want to check their bills and statements.

Enhancing the Customer’s Experience

Some 82% of consumers said they’d go paperless if the digital customer experience (CX) improved for their bills and statements. This statistic rose 11% from Broadridge’s 2022 study. Often, customers need a nudge, and incentives can help them make the switch. In an omnichannel world, whether presented on paper or online, “the onus is on bill senders,” says Pat McGrew, principal of consultancy McGrewGroup, Inc. “They need to provide a compelling reason for people to open [these] documents.”

As Byron Fernandez, executive VP/group CIO of outsourcing firm TDCX, told Forbes last November: “When customers feel understood and catered to, they are more likely to engage. . . .” Leveraging personalization and the power of multichannel communication streams is the key to engaging consumers. How those messages get sent (the medium) doesn’t really matter.

“The message could be emailed, printed, SMS-texted using WhatsApp or all of the above,” notes McGrew, the onetime HP inkjet-print “evangelist” and Kodak transpromotional expert who has evolved to become a multichannel communications proponent.

Bill Consolidation: A Reason to Engage

A consolidated portal is one way that billers can get promotional, educational, or informational messaging in front of more customers. With easier access to multiple bills at once, customers are more likely to open the files and be exposed to the messaging companies have worked so hard to compose and distribute.

With bill presentment through Cubby Paperless, document producers such as financial institutions, insurance companies, municipalities, and utilities send us print/digital presentment files. We present the bills, along with your transpromo messages and other content, just as you designed them.

When a customer does business with multiple companies that have signed up for our service, they can view and pay all their bills using their free Cubby account. Cubby Paperless makes it simpler for customers to interact with billers and other document-generating entities.

In their quest to lower costs and improve cash flow, some companies have inadvertently closed what was formerly a consistently opened and viewed customer communication. Now that customer relationships have evolved to a mostly digital environment, companies must give their customers reasons to view their transactional documents and renew that channel of communication.