The thing most people don’t know about billing issues is that they rarely have anything to do with billing. Of course, customers review, analyze and evaluate their bills. They will complain when they find something wrong. But once the company is providing reasonably “good bills” to its customers where one plus one equals two, customer complaints will have little to do with the billing process.

The basic tenet of billing is that “the bill is the ocean,” which means everything a company does flows into and eventually appears on the customer’s bill. Therefore, the customer’s billing complaints will reveal problems upstream in areas such as advertising, marketing, sales process, service offering, operations, etc. In this way, customer billing issues should be viewed as an internal diagnostic tool. Billing issues provide timely, useful information from current customers who provide detailed information and are passionate enough about the issue to inform the company of the issue and demand resolution. Resolving them will have real impact on the business and can be measured simply by tracking the reduction in billing issues.

When companies evaluate their business, they often focus on developing and supporting their services and products. Billing is an afterthought, considered a back-office function, not part of the customer experience. It's easy to understand why billing is neglected but also critical to recognize that "good bills" are a significant factor in a service provider's success. In fact, billing is a major part of the relationship between service providers and their customer's experience through their two most frequent interactions:

1) Each time the customer uses the service
2) Each time the customer receives their bill

I used to see frequent reports and blog postings about the success or failure of CRM systems. Lately, however, I hear radio silence. Has this technology finally turned the corner and achieved consistent ROI, delivering on expectations?

Probably not. The most recent survey from CSO Insights showed no appreciable change in CRM adoption within the sales community of the companies surveyed. CSO measures adoption when 90% of the sales force consider a CRM system a "must have." Lamentably, only roughly 39% of companies surveyed achieved that criteria.

Arguably, as major creators of information in a customer relationship, sales' failure to adopt a CRM system means that system has failed. I know from personal experience that salespeople cannot be bullied, nagged or even incented to use a tool they don't want. So wherein lies the answer? I always look at the "What's in it for me" (WiifM) measure. I suspect that WiifM drives behavior much more than we would wish to believe, and certainly has more impact than encouraging salespeople to be good corporate citizens. And why not? Depending on the industry, a typical sales person has to close $10,000 of business per day, which tends to create laser-like focus on what works and what doesn't.