The Value of Electronic Statement Presentment

Electronic Statement Presentment has been around for a number of years now and many companies have employed Electronic Statement Presentment technology with success.

For some consumers, the provision of statements electronically is highly desirable. It means that they can manage their financial relationship with your company easily whether in a hotel the other side of the world at home.

It also provides an additional vehicle for a company to market to their consumers. Just as we would use transpromo techniques on a traditional paper based statement, we can apply the same theory and logic to Electronic Statement Presentment.

So in the classic model, how does Electronic Statement Presentment work?

Electronic Statement presentment can be implemented and delivered most quickly and easily through the implementation of an electronic archive an retrieval (more latterly these are becoming known as 'Vaults') system. There are other ways of doing this but, they are complex to implement and perhaps have a greater value for B2B rather than B2C markets.

So, in this article I am not going to talk about high end Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP), the payment side of this is a topic worthy of at least a few articles!

The Document Archive and Retrieval system will typically reside within the remit of the document production management team. In order to generate the electronic statement, the first stage is exactly the same as for the production of a paper based document.

The Document Composition engine is thus the first stage of the process. In fact, it is likely that Electronic Statements will be generated as part of the same job. The difference is a switch flag within the data file that tells the composition engine whether the bill is for Electronic Presentment or not - many companies will choose to ingest every generated document into the Vault -, if not to enable consumer access but to enable call centre and customer service access to customer statements and documents. But more on this another time.

In its simplest form (we'll avoid talking about XML generated data for online presentment at this stage) the document composition engine generates a print stream. Once generated, this print stream can then be ingested into the Vault.  As the print stream is ingested, each customer statement is indexed by core characteristics - account number, name etc- and then utilising some clever compression algorithms is reduced in size and then stored in the vault.

For most Vault type systems, the compression algorithms are highly effective these days and can massively reduce the size of ingested print streams.

Most Vault systems have an API facility. This means that software such as that that drives your companies website can access the Vault. By communicating through the API, serach and retrieve requests can be made by virtually any business application.

Once the search is complete, an individuals document can be made available online. To the user, the visibility of the document looks just like your website and is seamless from a user perspective. The document is secure because it is the website that is managing access to the vault - so only documents relevant to an individual user can be seen.

Good document archive and retrieval software will provide the user with additional functionality - such as the ability to generate a report from the document. They can search for frequency of use of certain phone numbers, spends within a particular restaurant and so on.

Where customers can be persuaded to switch off paper based statements and to start using electronic statements, the savings for the company can be significant. The cost of physical mail is high whereas the cost of electonic presentment is very low. Some companies choose to offer incentives to encourage companies to move towards a paper billing process.

But perhaps the real value of the Electronic Statement is the way in which it draws you customer to your website. It encourages an ongoing dialogue. There is a necessity now for the customer to visit your website and this provides the opportunity to market to the customer more, perhaps encourage the customer to take a short survey or purchase more from your company.

It is perhaps not a good idea to email statements to a customer, this is essentially insecure and, it is not likely to draw the customer back to your website. However, an email with a link to a specially designed one - one log in landing page for that customer presents an exciting opportunity for customer engagement.

Electronic Statement Presentment will provide a host of operational benefts not least s the operational flexibility that the automated document factory will get and, the reduction in call periods within the call centre -because the statements are held electronically, they can be viewed in the call centre exactly as the customer sees them which speeds up problem resolution.

Most vendors have some kind of Vault system, some with some very powerful features. But this really is the easy way to get documents online and available to customers.

These systems can literally be up and running within a matter of days, they are low risk projects that reduce costs and enhance the service that you can deliver to your companies customers.