Bad Bills Leave Ten Percent of the Telecom Consumer Market Up for Grabs

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BOONTON, NJ. August 31, 1999:

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Ten percent of telecom consumers who receive one bill for local and long distance phone service do not know who their long distance company is, mostly as a result of poor bill design, says a new Telecom Consumer Report from Insight Research. These uninformed consumers can be prime targets for competing telephone companies and may represent up to $5.5 billion in annual telecom revenue.

According to Insight's report Billing Invisibility: Account Control and the Telecom Consumer, five percent of telecom consumers do not know who provides their long distance service, while another five percent incorrectly identify their local phone company as their long distance carrier. Their confusion stems from the monthly telephone statement, whose envelope and initial pages are emblazoned with the local phone company name and logo. The long distance charges and company name get buried in the middle of the local phone company bill, making brand identification for the long distance company nearly nonexistent.

"If telcos adopted the same billing strategies as credit card companies, they could begin using their bills as a marketing weapon instead of treating it like a ball and chain," says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight. "For instance, 50 percent of long distance billing problems either take over 24 hours to resolve or never get resolved at all. Credit card companies simply refund money to customers if their bill is incorrect. That may sound like an expensive proposition for phone companies, but after all, the bill is the only real customer interaction in an otherwise commodity market," Rosenberg concludes.

Further statistics on consumer churn and billing problem resolution, reviews of current phone bills and billing practices, and strategies for billing as a marketing tool are published in Billing Invisibility: Account Control and the Telecom Consumer, an 84-page market research study. An excerpt is online at  www.insight-corp.com/billing.asp.

Operations Support Systems 2002-2007

Wireless Operations Support Systems 2002-2007

Online Customer Care and Billing

Donna Savino

at Insight Research

973-541-9600