Bob’s Ramble: How Does Your Organization Benefit from Driving Adoption?

If you’ve heard the InvoiceCloud team talk about “adoption” in the past, we are generally referring to e-adoption or electronic billing and payment adoption. For organizations like yours to get the most out of the InvoiceCloud solution, customers must use the platform to receive and pay their bills. And while this might sound simple and straightforward, it’s anything but. Many customers are not accustomed to paying through digital channels – in fact, they may not even realize these options exist.

Customer adoption isn’t limited to online or mobile payments, either. Adoption can refer to any kind of customer self-service such as enrolling in services like AutoPay, payment reminders, electronic copies of reports (ex. annual water quality reports), or paperless billing. We’ll get into just a few of ways encouraging customers to adopt these routes is beneficial for your organization, but let’s start with how we measure this metric of adoption.

How is Adoption Measured?

Many organizations measure adoption by the average number of electronic payments made divided by the total number of bills issued. For example, if 10,000 bills/month are issued and 2,500/month are paid electronically, that would result in 25% e-payment adoption.

For most billing organizations, the most desirable state is for all customers to both go paperless and sign up for automatic electronic payments, frequently referred to as AutoPay. This provides the simplest, lowest cost collection for the biller. Since the vast majority of those consumers who go paperless also choose to pay online, electronic payment adoption has become the most common measurement of digital billing and payments solutions effectiveness. InvoiceCloud has one customer who has almost 100% paperless and 100% online payment, but we are working towards having more!

Why Measure Electronic Payment Adoption?

There are many reasons why it’s important to actively drive and measure adoption, but here’s the bottom line: the more customers who use self-service options to pay their bills, sign up for paperless billing, or enroll in AutoPay, the less time and money your staff needs to spend on each of these items. That means those backburner projects can finally get tended to!

Here are a few benefits billing organizations can see when they’re focused on driving adoption:

1. Increased Customer Satisfaction

These days, it’s easier than ever to get things done whenever and wherever we want. Grocery and drug stores are equipped with self-checkout kiosks to expedite our shopping process, and restaurants are increasingly offering online and mobile ordering. Amazon makes it easy to buy an item with one-click purchases, and banks allow us to check and balance our accounts right from our phones.

And while it might not seem like an apples-to-apples comparison, customers expect these easy, frictionless experiences when making a payment with your organization, too. Being able to offer customers easy ways to self-serve through the InvoiceCloud solution has been shown to directly increase customer satisfaction scores. This increased satisfaction means fewer customer calls and visits with questions and complaints.

2. Accelerated Collections

When customers use e-payment channels to pay their bills, the amount of time that needs to be spent manually collecting and processing payments is greatly reduced. And when customers enroll in services like AutoPay, your organization is guaranteed that payments will show up on time, every billing cycle.

3. Cost Savings

Increased enrollment in services like paperless billing translates to real cost savings in the form of decreased print and mailing costs. For example, if you contract a company that provides check remittance processing (ex. lockbox services), you may be able to save money by driving e-adoption and eliminating the need for lockboxes all together.

4. Decreased Manual Labor and Staff Workloads

For those who mail their own bills, fewer paper bills also mean less time spent stuffing and mailing envelopes, processing manual checks, and fielding customer complaints or resolving customer issues. This means your team can spend more time on those higher priority projects, and more time communicating with customers to improve satisfaction and service levels.

Want to learn how you can spread the word about InvoiceCloud’s self-service options? Our team offers a great online Marketing Resource Center, chock full of promotional materials! You can also email billermarketing@invoicecloud.net for questions about driving adoption in your unique customer base or to be one of our early adopters for the 100% paperless, 100% AutoPay program.