In theory, e-billing has a lot to offer the consumer: less mail and paper arriving in the your mailbox, the convenience of having all of your bills arrive reliably, and the ability to quickly and easily pay your bills online.
For companies adopting e-billing, the biggest benefit are clearly lower costs. Rather than spend $1 or so generating a paper bill and then putting it in the mail, they can create and send e-bills for pennies.
The reality, however, is e-billing has yet to catch fire with 95% of households still getting a paper bill each month. Why? Because the benefits for companies sending bills outweigh the benefits for people receiving bills. If you’re a consumer, what’s the real incentive for embracing e-billing? Do you get a small break on your bills – say 1% – if you receive it electronically? No. So, where’s the carrot for giving up paper for bits and bytes each billing cycle?
Nevertheless, bill senders continue to pound away on consumers about the wonders of e-billing. Roger, for example, is running a radio campaign in which some guy talks about how e-billing has “changed his life” because he longer has a stack of paper bills on his kitchen table every month. Frankly, it’s a pitch that may resonate with some people but it’s still struggling to hit home with the mainstream consumer.
There is hope, however, for e-billing: the environment/green movement. If bills can be sent electronically rather than using paper then fewer trees need to be chopped down. Given how enthusiastically consumers are biting on everything green these days, saving the environmentally could be the salvation for e-billing.
Of course, sending bills online does involve energy to power all those computers and servers so it’s not like e-billing has no carbon footprint. But if I were an e-biller, I’d be painting myself green all over in a major way while counting the savings as consumers sign on because they want to do something good for Mother Earth.
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Mark,
One of the reasons I have not adopted e-billing from a broader variety of vendors is the complexity of their bills. You mention Rogers in your post. Well, my Rogers bill runs nine pages in length. And it is full of all kinds of line item charges. I need to print it out and parse it line by line to figure out just what they are charging me for.
If companies want us to adopt e-billing, they should change their practices to simplify the way they charge us and make their bills more easily understood when reviewing them online.
I do not think the issue is that the benefits of e-billing are greater for the biller than the consumer, it is the benefits of e-billing are not sufficiently high for the consumer to change his/her behaviour from paper to electronic.
This is an awareness issue combined with getting people out of their old habits. Some people (like my wife) actually enjoy writing out cheques and mailing them to billers. Electronic bill payment is seen as a less enjoyable experience.
I would suggest that there are not many people who fall into this category of enjoying the process of bill payment using paper but it highlights that changing behaviour is about more than efficiency…and the green movement may be another tool to help people make the transition.
E-billing isn’t all that “green” for those of us who have a home office. The tax man wants us to keep records of our expenses and the simplest and easiest way is still to print out the invoices. In these cases e-billing just shifts the use of paper from the vendor to the customer.
Pssh, e-billing doesn’t really save that many trees. Paper nowadays mostly comes from farmed trees, about 99% of it in fact. E-billing is something that really only benefits the biller. Until billers offer more incentive (something like at least $1 off your bill per month or a one-time $5 discount), there won’t be a big migration to e-billing. I use e-billing simply for the fact that I’m a university student and use my parent’s home address for all my bills. I don’t want my mom looking at my credit card statements and what-not.
Mark,
Greetings from London, and thank you for your insightful article. I thought you might want to hear a vendor’s view on why ebilling is ‘yet to catch fire with 95% of households’.
I recently wrote the following:
Traditional online billing portals, whilst straight-forward to implement for the biller, lack the key prerequisites of simplicity and ease-of-use for the customer. Remembering a complex, system-generated username and password, keying these in without error and then navigating through a maze of web pages to find the relevant ebill has kept would-be users of online billing away in their droves. This model of insisting that recipients must fetch their billing data is akin to the postal service asking us to collect our letters and mail from various warehouses around the country.
…So, the answer is to change the model. Instead of trying to change customer behaviour, companies should simply participate in their customers’ daily routine, by sending their ebill to their inbox. Email billing has a fundamental advantage in that the biller can control the adoption rates and rollout. All that is required is the customer’s email address.
The full article can be read online:
Why has Electronic Billing Adoption Stalled?
Perhaps a ‘PUSH’ is all it takes for consumers to go paperless. Key strategies for B2C billers are discussed to increase the number of people enrolled in electronic billing.
http://www.prlog.org/10171649