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.

I just returned from speaking at the Akamai Customer Conference as a member of a panel called “Accelerating Global Collaboration across the Enterprise.” It fell into the first of three tracks at the conference: 1) Enterprise / High Tech, 2) Media & Entertainment, and 3) Commerce. (Incidentally, I noticed the panel had a much higher number of attendees this year than in the past. Is this a direct correlation to my participation?)

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

The news is in: IntraLinks has won another customer service award!

This year's International Business Award for Best Customer Service Team recognizes the superlative performance of IntraLinks' Global Enterprise Services organization. The award will be collected by Denise Simpson at a star-studded ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, on the 14th September.