Reduce Billing Costs
Striata's Email Bill Presentment and Payment solution can help billers achieve significant reductions in costs associated with paper, printing and posting of bills and statements. By removing paper, mailing and manual processing, operating costs can be reduced by between 65-85%, with minimal capital outlay.

The cost saving potential of replacing paper bills and statements with electronic documents is undisputed. The primary challenge today in realizing these cost reductions, is not in the logistics of replacing paper with online, digital and electronic formats, but in building customer adoption of paper turn off strategies.

Research has shown that customers are more likely to turn-off paper bills if they receive an electronic equivalent directly into their email inbox. (Cathy Graeber, Forrester, 2005). According to January 2008 research, over 43% of consumers would prefer to receive their eBill as a secure attachment, while only 14% would choose to visit their biller's website to view and pay their bill.

The primary challenge in realizing cost reductions

Delivering documents to customer inboxes - as opposed to asking them to search and download documents that you previously delivered by mail - can drive customer adoption of your paperless strategy significantly. In many cases, however, customers who are used to having bills and statements simply arrive at their homes are now being asked to retrieve these documents from the biller's website.

The problem is that for most customers, it is still more convenient to receive paper documents by mail than to search and retrieve bills, statements and other documents from a website. Some consumers don't feel comfortable with that level of technology. Others are concerned over phishing. For the vast majority of customers however, it's just easier to take no action and yet, still have their bills delivered to them.
Two step paper turn off strategy for reducing billing costs
  1. Reduce the monetary and environmental costs of paper output, by replacing paper with rich electronic documents. Striata's electronic document delivery solution helps reduce paper output and the associate costs by replacing high volume system generated paper documents with rich interactive electronic documents that are delivered directly to customer inboxes.
  2. Make it convenient for your customers to support your paper turn off strategy by delivering the electronic documents to them, instead of expecting them to download the documents. Most customers prefer not to be impacting the environment and will therefore help you turn off paper; you must simply make it more convenient for them to receive the data electronically, as a file, instead of a paper document. 

The advantage of Striata's email billing

The key to customer adoption is therefore not just in the replacement of paper, but in delivering the alternative to the customer.

Striata's solution therefore attends to every detail involving the delivery channel:
  • Strategies to help clients collect customer email addresses.
  • Ease of process in transfer of client data.
  • Universal platform support for the eDocument format, and the ability to match the look and feel of the paper that it replaces.
  • The use of email as the delivery channel and not the web, as email is still the reigning digital communication channel of choice.
  • Deliverability strategies to ensure maximum inbox penetration.
  • Security mechanisms to protect the integrity of the electronic document.
  • One click access to view and save the electronic document.