Future state billing roadmap

CXCO was engaged by our client to develop a future state vision for a key customer touchpoint – the bill. The existing bill was confusing customers, causing significant servicing issues, and resulting in high call volumes. In addition, the existing bill format was costly to produce, and not meeting the needs of a growing number of customers that wanted a more streamlined, digital experience.

CXCO coordinated and engaged groups from across the organisation to understand and evaluate business expectations, thinking, concepts and solutions. It was identified that the business was not in a position from a capability and technology perspective to implement a large amount of changes to the bill in the short-term. It was at this point that we agreed that the most valuable “vision” for the business was one that considered the stages of evolution of the bill, matching the physical evolution with the evolution of the backstage capabilities and technical systems that supported the creation and delivery of the bill experience.

The outcome was a roadmap of phased initiatives across channels, which focused on reducing confusion and decreasing call handing times. The experience was enhanced by a strategy to provide “next best offer” capabilities, and reduce calls to the service centres by pre-empting customer questions and directing customers to self-serve through digital channels. The final vision indicated three stages of the bill evolution, and helped the project team understand where their data and technical activities would occur in line with the front stage evolution.

What were the key benefits?

  • An actionable strategy was created to reduced call handle times and call frustration.
  • An evolution roadmap enabled the technical team to make the transition from current to future state by considering the technical strategy in tangible stages.
  • The staged vision enabled our client to make decisions around business and operating models for the future.

What were the key results?

  • A strategy that mapped solutions across touchpoints and the customer life-cycle.
  • A “smarter” bill that provided relevant recommendations to customers and proactive support when they needed it.
  • Converted a cost centre into a profit centre – helping the billing function to increase revenue and relevance.
  • A roadmap illustrated with key evolutionary changes helped inform implementation plans.

What was the approach?

Through collaborative workshops we explored how both business and retail customers used the bill, the key information hierarchy of the content in the bill, key content of value to the customer and the behaviour and needs of the customer as they use the bill.

Our consultants gained insight into the technical constraints and capabilities of the database and systems that fed data into the bill. This helped them to understand the rationale behind usability issues with regard to labelling, architecture and messaging in the bill, and enabled them to make informed recommendations with regard to the data strategy, delivery stages, and final design.

We then worked with our client’s team to prototype and evolve ideas that emerged following analysis of the customer, business and technical data. The opportunities pursued were those that met the most pressing customer needs, could be achieved following a staged technical roadmap, and were aligned to current and planned capabilities. The output was a phase roadmap and vision considering the bill itself and support channels such as the call centre and digital touchpoints.

The evolution roadmap articulated solutions across touchpoints and the customer life-cycle, considering the bill, service centre, online store, retail store, CRM, customer portal, and the sales and on-boarding experience. A marketing and sales strategy enabled provision of targeted, personalised promotions linked to behaviour, need, and situation. These elements helped the customer by providing recommendations that were needed at a point in time, and provided the business a means to increase revenue and relevance. A series of prototypes were created to reflect the solutions over time; mapped on an evolution roadmap; and supported by a series of detailed artifacts to inform implementation plans.