The Benefits of Using a Utility Billing Management Software

Are you a utility company looking to revamp your billing operations to guarantee accuracy, efficiency and scalable growth? Utilizing the right utility billing management software can put you in the fast lane to success through transformational improvements in operational flow. Here’s how!

1. Accurate Billing – Every time!

In 2019, 40% of all energy-related complaints in the UK had to do with inaccurate billing. Erroneous metering data, weak IT systems, and account mismatching from manual handling are some of the reasons behind this failure. A smooth and error-free billing process is the most fundamental obligation any enterprise has to its customers. When this fails, your utility business is sure to experience some heavy turbulence.

With a utility bill management service, you never have to doubt the accuracy of the bills and invoices sent out to your consumer again! The software allows you to easily manage your customer database while automating its billing lifecycle.

A built-in meter can track customer usage and generate accurate charges on a tailored invoice, all without you or your customer lifting a finger. Automation also makes sure that the bill is received by the customer at the right time in their subscription billing cycle, making late bills a thing of the past!

Also Read: 6 Reasons Why you Need to Invest in Usage-based Subscription Plans

2. Seamless Workflow

Isolated billing systems patched into a clunky infrastructure can lead to bottlenecks with catastrophic results such as mismatched payments, damaging delays and huge discrepancies. This not only leads to a high customer churn rate but also makes it impossible to scale up your business.

Utility billing management software integrates your entire workflow in one seamless interface. No more poor connectivity across different parts leads to smooth information flow for unprecedented efficiency in your billing and billing adjacent operations.

3. Customer Retention through Automation

Many companies handle their billing operation manually through legacy software. This opens your business up to the human error, decreased efficiency, high customer churn, revenue leakage, high involuntary churn, high customer dissatisfaction, as well as, employee burnout. Phew! That’s a lot on the line.

Billing management software can protect you from all this and more by smoothing out the kinks in the entire process. The customer database is easily managed against selected billing models, self-service portals allow customers to switch between subscription plans without any hassle, error-free and timely invoices unclog your customer service channels and the list goes on and on.

Also Read: Lessons to Learn from Churned Customers for Improved Customer Retention

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4. E-Utility Billing

A billing software provides great flexibility in billing models that may include: recurrent, one-time, consumption-based, volume-based or rule-based billing. Adopt the billing model that suits your business needs and get it implemented through subscription management software for utility companies. The automated software keeps the processing of billing streamlined in a way that in the end, the flow of the revenue remains smooth.

5. Online Payment Processing

Billing management software also enables you to accept online payments with ease. Enabling paperless transactions is a need not a luxury in the 21^st century. And it’s easy! Integrating a secure payment gateway with your utility billing platform and providing your customers with hosted payment pages (HPPs) means paying for your electricity, water or gas consumption no longer has to be a tedious process.

6. Self-Service Portal

With a self-service portal, your customers can check on their subscription cycle anytime they please! They can upgrade, downgrade or terminate it and track their payments as well. The customer can receive a bill, make their payment and receive an automated invoice and renewal email notification in just a few clicks.

7. Customer Complaint Management

The self-service page can also be powered with a customer feedback and complaint feature to resolve any consumer pain points well in time to prevent churn. The workflow of complaints being registered and redirected to the relevant teams for resolution can also be automated.

The potential of AI-powered chat boxes is more evolved than ever before, with things like ChatGPT taking the tech world by storm. These are sure to improve the customer subscription journey through efficient handling and resolution of complaints and queries.

8. Seamless and Error-Free Invoicing

Depending on the billing model, your customer subscribes to, the layouts of your invoices may vary. Employing billing software to do this on your behalf makes sure that the invoice reaching your customer will be accurate, on-time and eliminate any invoice-related grievances from your customers.

Also Read: Leverage SubscriptionFlow To Make Recurring Invoicing Process More Efficient

9. Limitless Market Expansion

It is simply impossible to expand into a bigger market without billing software to automate your billing, invoicing and payments. All the red flags that arise from manual or isolated billing workflows are sure to severely sabotage the scalability of your enterprise. The good news? These are easy to overcome by making the switch to dedicated and reliable utility billing software.

10. Adapting to Changing Regulatory Landscape

With Europe’s energy crisis leading to a more turbulent than ever regulatory landscape, the need for flexibility and adaptability in your billing workflows is more important than ever before.

A taxation engine, incorporated into your billing automation system, allows you to apply the correct tax to each bill based on the customer’s location stored in your database. Such an engine can also implement any changes in regulation automatically without creating tax noncompliance issues for your company. Even this software can be integrated with other third-party accounting and tax management software.

Utility businesses have a lot to gain from using a good utility billing platform to automate billing and billing adjacent tasks. Here at SubscriptionFlow, we would love to tell you more about how we help make utility billing seamless and efficient. Schedule a demo with us to learn more!