This Earth Day, we’d like to highlight a self-service option in the payment route that’s beneficial for billing organizations, the planet, and highly convenient for customers: paperless billing. 

In the last year alone, InvoiceCloud clients have boosted their paperless billing efforts by an average of 54%, reaching upwards of a 195,950% increase in paperless adoption, and saving countless trees in the process. 

To celebrate the critical impact this service has on the reduction of paper waste, let’s review how paperless billing adoption can benefit your organization and how to encourage your customers to take this step towards going green. Plus, we’ll highlight a few eco-friendly rock stars that have worked with InvoiceCloud to achieve all-time high levels of paperless adoption.  

What are the benefits of paperless billing adoption for your organization? 

Besides eliminating paper usage, driving customers to enroll in paperless billing can have incredible benefits for your organization. Here are just a few results your team can see as paperless billing adoption increases: 

1. Accelerated collections

When customers receive bills digitally (and, crucially, have the ability to pay those bills online), the amount of time that needs to be spent manually collecting and processing payments is greatly reduced. Not to mention that paperless billing encourages more consistent, on-time payments for your organization and helps to reduce delinquencies.

2. Cost savings

Increased enrollment in services like paperless billing translates to real cost savings in the form of decreased print and mailing costs. (You’ll see below that one InvoiceCloud client has saved up to $30k annually, just from reducing these printing and mailing costs with increased paperless adoption.) 

3. Decreased staff workloads

For those who mail their own bills, fewer paper bills also means less time spent stuffing and mailing envelopes. With paperless billing, your staff also spends significantly less time processing manual checks. This means your staff can spend more time on higher priority projects, and more time communicating with customers to improve satisfaction and service levels. Plus, an easy-to-use self-service route like paperless billing means less time that your customer service staff needs to spend fielding customer complaints or resolving customer issues. 

4. Increased customer satisfaction

When an online payment platform makes it simple for customers to enroll in services like paperless billing, it removes friction points for your customer. This increased ability for customers to self-serve ultimately improves the customer experience. And when customers enroll in paperless specifically, you’ve really made their life easier – the number one reason people choose to be digitally billed is to reduce household clutter (i.e. stacks of bills), so offering paperless billing also drives increased customer satisfaction. 

How can you encourage paperless adoption? 

Ultimately, the key to driving higher paperless adoption rates is improving the customer engagement and customer experience (CX) of your online payment platform. 

For starters, customers need to know that there are opportunities to go paperless through your online payment solution. Buttons or links with clear language like “Enroll in Paperless Billing Here” is a great place to start but, ideally, your online payment solution should go further to maximize every possible customer engagement point along the payment route. 

Every single customer interaction is an opportunity for engagement and conversion to self-service. This means your organization needs to optimize both online and offline channels to encourage customers to enroll in time and cost-saving services like paperless billing. 

A few channels that are commonly overlooked include: 

• One-time or guest checkout route: Almost half of all payers use a one-time payment or guest checkout route to pay their bills, i.e. a payment route where customers do not need to register to make a payment, so they never login to an account. It’s therefore critical to optimize the guest checkout route for engagement. This means prompting payers throughout the checkout process to enroll in self-service options like paperless billing.
• Post-payment: Even after a customer has made a payment, your organization should still be prompting them to enroll in self-service options. With so few engagement points available to your billing organization, you need to take advantage of interacting with the customer during routine payment processes. This includes promoting paperless billing enrollment on online and e-mail payment confirmation screens.
• Paper bills: For customers who are not already making payments online or enrolled in paperless billing, the paper bill is still a key engagement point. Use the bill itself or an insert in a bill to help convert customers to online payment and self-service options. We know that for some industries, sending a paper bill is required – but that doesn’t mean your customers can’t pay online. If your organization must send paper bills, turn your efforts towards promoting your online payment methods.

By offering an engaging, well-designed online payment platform, your organization can drive more customers to self-service enrollment and significantly increase paperless billing adoption. 

InvoiceCloud clients have made major strides towards going paperless 

InvoiceCloud is committed to making our clients’ jobs easier in every way, including their continuous commitment to going green. InvoiceCloud’s platform makes it easy for your customers to seamlessly enroll in self-service programs and opt for paperless statements – reducing billing costs for you and helping save the planet, one letter at a time. 

This Earth Day, we wanted to celebrate some paperless adoption increases of our very own InvoiceCloud clients and a few incredible benefits they’ve seen as a result. 

So, how did these Invoice Cloud clients (and countless others) yield these results? Invoice Cloud’s platform was designed to engage customers at every possible opportunity, encouraging them to register for paperless billing (and other self-service options) throughout the payment route. That’s just one reason why Invoice Cloud’s platform achieves 2-3 times average online payment higher adoption rates than any other solution in the industry. 

To learn more about how your organization can better engage customers and improve your adoption rates – for paperless billing, AutoPay, or online payment adoption in general – download our free ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement, below.