If you’re like me, you receive an assortment of mailed and emailed bills and other customer communications, plus text reminders and confirmations. Some companies send all three.
My monthly payments also are a hodgepodge of bank bill pay, biller websites, and automatic bank withdrawals or charges to credit cards. And I still write checks to cover some bills—even if they’ve been emailed to me.
My billing and payments approach is quite typical. It also reflects the state of U.S. transactional communications and payments for the foreseeable future.
While there is a clear and ongoing consumer shift to digital, mailed paper communications and payments remain and will remain important. The reasons include:
- Competitive and interoperability constraints across billers and banks
- Customer expectations and preferences
- Lack of universal smartphone and broadband access
- Legal and compliance requirements
- Cybersecurity and privacy concerns
From documents to experiences
This broad outlook does not mean that companies should stick with business as usual when it comes to customer communications and payments. Far from it, in fact.
There’s a lot of innovation in customer outreach and the technologies that enable it. Companies that don’t adapt will fall behind.
By digitally transforming operations with customer communications management (CCM) software and electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions, companies have all the tools in place to improve satisfaction and loyalty at a critical stage of the customer experience—billing and payments. These digital technologies give companies the maximum flexibility and control to meet each customer’s preferences now and as needs, channels and business conditions change.
What that increasingly means is moving from transactional documents to highly personalized, dynamic and digital and mobile experiences that drive engagement and payments. (Read the accompanying Industry Insights article: Digital Transformation Is the Great Enabler of Excellent Customer Experience).
Omnichannel innovation and investments
At Nordis, we are focused on delivering competitive advantage to our clients through our suite of digital and print and mail outsourcing solutions that are best in class both individually and collectively.
A key differentiator for us—and our clients—is the seamless integration of our Expresso® CCM platform for developing personalized print, email and text messaging with digital and print production and distribution. Clients can further consolidate and simplify managing the entire consumer communications and payments cycle by adding our ExpressoPay® EBPP system.
To keep up with growing demand, we’ve recently doubled our print production and mailing operation in Las Vegas (Read more in our recent article: Loving Las Vegas – Production Facility Investments Keep Client Needs and Protection Front and Center). Both Nevada and Florida plants are equipped with state-of-the-art high-speed, roll-fed dynamic color printers, inserters and other advanced technologies and services for creating state-of-the-art print communications and mailing efficiencies.
Digital
Similarly, we are constantly enhancing our digital capabilities to meet surging interest from our clients. Through features like Text to Pay with ExpressoPay, consumers receive a text that has a summary of their bill, and they can respond “pay” or “yes” to the text and the payment will be processed.
Another new ExpressoPay enhancement is surcharging. This capability enables billers to add a fee (typically a percentage of the transaction) to any credit card payments. The fee is only used to offset the merchant processing fees associated with credit card transactions, not as a revenue source for the biller. Companies effectively reduce the burden of merchant processing costs while the surcharge persuades more customers to use ACH (and not a credit card) which is also more cost effective for the biller.
More innovations on the digital front:
Right now, companies can use Expresso to blend the types of print, digital and pay methods to build the right result for their business and their consumers. It truly is a new day in using digital and print together to drive the best experience.
If you’re interested in updating your strategies and programs to make the most of both digital and print/mail, please contact us.
