Utility comparison websites are an excellent way for consumers to visit a website and compare various products and suppliers. Some of the benefits of comparison websites are their ability to save you time spent researching and comparing offers for products on a single website.
When a leading comparison website was looking for a new way to improve their internal processes and enhance their customer experience, they turned to Bill Identity to deploy its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Utility Bill Parsing solution.
Problem
When residential electricity customers visited this leading comparison website, they needed to enter 20+ data points first from their electricity bills before they were presented with a comparison of various offers. Customers soon began to express their frustration over the time and effort required to enter their usage and billing data. As a result of this, sales opportunities were missed, and many customers dropped off.
The company knew that something needed to change.
The comparison site responded by allocating a large team of customer service operators to assist customers in uploading their manual data. Doing this meant diverting members of the customer service team from other crucial tasks—such as cross-selling and managing customer relationships. The process was monotonous and time-consuming, and keying errors impacted the quality of data and further increased customer frustration. Having to deploy additional staff meant that the cost to acquire these customers increased.
The company needed a tool that could eradicate the manual process of keying in data. The tool also needed to automatically collect, read and reformat utility bill data so that the comparison site could quickly recommend alternatives to its customers. It needed a partner that could provide real-time parsing as part of the customer experience.
Solution
Bid reviewed the comparison company’s customer acquisition process extensively to understand the points of friction in the user experience. Bid and the company both agreed that Bid’s RPA-enabled Utility Bill Parsing was precisely what the comparison site required to maximize their Utility Bill comparison process.
As the SaaS Utility Bill Parsing solution is securely hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the client was able to quickly stand up a solution that is secure, flexible, and dynamically scalable.
The comparator could realize the lower cost-per-acquisition benefits and redistribute their customer service team to higher-yielding tasks, diverting their focus to cross-selling and up-selling other products that increased revenue and customer satisfaction further.
Outcome
Bid’s Utility Bill Parsing solution has helped the comparison company reduce customer acquisition costs, increase conversions while reducing customer service interventions, and enhance the customer experience overall.
Customers can now easily and quickly compare their electricity bills to supplier offers online using just one bill. Their customers can now choose to upload a pdf copy of their electricity bill rather than manually enter 20+ fields from their energy bill, which removes the hassle of shopping for a new deal on energy. Removing these 20+ steps delivered a time saving of 10-15 minutes per customer interaction while reducing the upfront effort to get relevant Energy offer comparisons.
The impact of this partnership has been significant. On average, this technology helps over 1,600 people compare their utility providers each month, and it is growing. The unique-purpose built software helped the comparison company, which can now provide a streamlined customer experience. The parsing technology speed is almost instantaneous, Â As manual data entry errors are eliminated, the offers presented are more accurate.
Before Utility Bill Parsing was implemented, entering key customer billing information to drive the comparison process was resource-intensive and time-consuming. Now, this entire team has been re-allocated to resume higher-value, customer-impacting tasks that directly impact the bottom line.
Before
- Manual data uploads were slow and resource-intensive.
- Manual processes resulted in input data entry errors that flowed onto comparison and billing errors
- The amount of time it took to upload data was inconsistent and the customer experience lacked continuity
- A customer service team was recruited to assist customers with the manual and timely process of uploading bill data which was a costly exercise.
- A significant number of potential customers were dropping off, not wanting to engage with a call center, wait or enter in all the 20+ pieces of information from their utility bills.
After
- Time saving of 10-15 minutes per customer interaction.
- Seamless digital experience with one point of entry.
- Customers can simply drag and drop their electricity bills directly to the comparison website.
- Bills are parsed and ingested into the comparison on average in less than 2 seconds.
- Significant reduction in the number of steps required to onboard a new customer means more customers and less cost to serve.
- Accurate data delivered instantaneously thereby driving a greatly enhanced user experience.
