Challenge

A leading international communications service provider wished to support their mass and large business segments with an improved online bill payment and reporting experience. Their customers’ acceptance of online billing was in the 25-35% range for businesses of some size, and much closer to zero for small businesses. The client wished to push those penetrations to higher ranges.

Their own research had suggested that effective bill analysis and reporting as part of an overall robust online billing offering would be essential to get customers to switch off paper bills and go fully online. They concluded that good bill reporting is an essential offering for these segments, would be a distinct competitive advantage, and a significant sales tool. Further, moving their business customers online in the first place would also allow a significant shift of customer care calls to the self-care environment; thereby, reducing costs and generally improving various measures of customer satisfaction.

Thus, for this client, the question was not whether to upgrade their online billing offerings, but how to best make it happen. As TMNG Global had recently successfully concluded a similar project for the client’s consumer segment, they asked the firm for help on this initiative as well.

TMNG Global Solution

TMNG Global agreed with the client that a sound online billing platform is ‘table stakes’, but it is also clear that superior sites lead to higher adoption rates, better customer satisfaction scores and lower operating costs. TMNG constructed the approach to this project to ensure that the client would be able to understand how its own business customers viewed online billing, how likely they were to adopt it, how they could “operationalize” an online strategy based upon their customers’ needs and how they could match those customer needs with the capabilities of their own infrastructure.

TMNG Global’s customizable approach to developing an online billing strategy involves focused research and analysis including benchmarking, industry best practices, customer requirements and a thorough understanding of client business goals that translates good practices into real-world success.

• In the benchmarking analysis, competitive and industry-leading sites are evaluated by relevant features, form and function, acknowledging the differences between the needs of the various targeted business segments.
• Interviews with key carriers, businesses and governmental agencies are conducted to determine the effectiveness of the benchmarking results as well as to assess best practices throughout the industry.
• Highly focused primary research is used to identify the unique requirements of the client’s customer base on a segment by segment basis. The most appropriate research method, in this case – interviews – is selected based upon the market segment and research objectives.
• Customer requirements arising from the benchmarking, best practices and market research are then cross-referenced by customer priority, implementation and business risk in order to drive user interface prototype development. That prototype is then subjected to rigorous usability testing to test the design principles arising from the research.
• Finally, a business case is developed with input from internal stakeholders that measures the impact of the online service strategy, justifies the investment, provides performance metrics, and promotes the initiative.

Project Approach

Step 1: Discovery

TMNG met with the Billing and Business Segment staffs to examine in detail their current project status, and to understand:

• Their current offering and its functionality
  • How it was accessed
  • What bill reporting functions are currently offered
  • Customer feedback received
  • Customer take-up rates and other results
  • The preferences of business segment staff and the billing teams for the features in the various bill reporting packages
• Their views on the strengths and weaknesses of their current offering
• Their goals:
  • Adoption rates
  • Use of self-care
  • Cost savings
  • Customer satisfaction measures

Step 2: Best Practice Research

The importance of a proven benchmarking methodology cannot be overstated, even to the best performing companies. Too often, companies base their assessments of performance on how close they come to meeting the goals set forth in the original plan, with little understanding of competitive offerings and industry best practices. Extending internal goals to comparative analysis through benchmarking with peer companies serves to ensure an even more rigorous commitment to performance excellence.

TMNG designed the best practice research phase for this project to target global communications carriers, enterprises, and governmental entities. The lines of inquiry for the latter two entities were essentially the same as for the carriers, but were modified to fit the variations in their operating environments. Areas addressed included:

• How bill reporting functions as part of the overall offering
  • How is bill reporting positioned overall
  • How does the user enter and exit the application
  • How does the user learn of its full range of capabilities
  • How privileges to use are handled
  • Confidentiality concerns
  • The differences in approach to mass business size businesses versus large business size businesses?
• Collateral concerns included:
  • The importance of the bill reporting offering to overall take-up rates
    • What are the competitive dynamics
    • How helpful is a good offering to the sales effort
  • Steps taken to drive adoption rates
    • If they will divulge it, what adoption rates have been achieved › What are their future adoption targets
    • Does this vary for mass versus large business
  • Online billing packages
    • The features and functionality that have proven most popular
      • Does this vary by size and type of customer
      • Have any of the uses led to reliability or other problems?
    • Have the packages, and supporting functionality, resulted in a reduction of customer care calls
      • What kinds of calls are being driven to self care
      • Realized savings

The results of the best practices research took the form of advanced and detailed ideation, coupled with an examination of what has worked and can be duplicated, versus what had failed and should be avoided. The common trends of this research were then validated against the customer requirements gathered in the customer interviews that followed.

Step 3: Primary Market Research

The market research plan developed by TMNG Global and approved by the client involved a series of detailed face-to-face and telephone interviews of mass business, enterprise and government customers. TMNG Global designed the questionnaire, conducted the face-to-face interviews, a portion of the phone interviews and analyzed the results. A local research vendor conducted the recruitment process and the remainder of the telephone interviews. TMNG Global worked with the vendor, but was ultimately responsible for assessing the findings and developing the final report and recommendations.

Step 4: Usability Testing

Customer requirements arising from the benchmarking, best practices and market research were cross-referenced by customer priority and implementation/business risk in order to drive user interface prototype development. In all, more than 150 prioritized recommendations for the user interface, features and functions were delivered to the client.

TMNG Global worked closely with the technology vendor to design the prototype to demonstrate sufficient technical progress so that the testers would experience a robust and well-functioning offering that also provided the improvements identified in the project.

In the usability testing process, TMNG individually observed and recorded the responses of over twenty customers of each of the customers segments as they interacted with the prototype. We recorded our observations, measured click counts and documented the tests in a standardized way. The objective was to measure the receptivity and utility of the new platform and provide further guidance to technical teams in the implementation of recommendations.

Exit interviews were also conducted to gain additional feedback. These interviews and the tests validated the changes to the site as evidenced in the fact that the site scored very well in five major usability categories.

Step 5: Business Case Development

With input from the research, our technology partner and internal stakeholders, the TMNG Global team developed a comprehensive business case that measured the impact of the online service strategy, provided performance metrics, preliminary marketing and technology plans and costs, as well as a comprehensive benefits assessment including customer satisfaction, paperless bill savings and customer care impact.

Benefits to the Client

The “Voice of the Customer” had been captured in over 250 pages of detailed findings, benchmarking results and best practices assessments. Those findings had been successfully validated in the usability testing process, over 150 customer requirements were defined and prioritized and the client received a detailed business case and development roadmap from which to chart its online billing course. The business case clearly demonstrated various pathways to the achievement of the client’s online billing adoption and cost savings objectives.

This package of results and recommendations generated by the TMNG Global and technology team were formally presented to client executive management and communicated widely within the client community, receiving unanimous support and approval. The client expressed its approbation of the methodology employed during the project, the results obtained and voiced their determination to move forward with full implementation of all of the priority one recommendations from the research in Phase One of their deployment.