No customer loves getting bills. But bills filled with errors, coupled with unsatisfying customer service is a prescription for disaster. A national communications corporation asked Ki Group to tell them why their billing was getting them into customer relations hot water.

In a major corporation there are a lot of elements connected with billing, and in this case we looked into all of them—billing systems, business processes, training, customer service. We pored over call surveys and reports, reviewed customer complaints, and how billing problems were handled. We talked to managers and staff level personnel involved in the process. We found what you might expect, some problems with billing systems and applications, some of which were already under repair. But we found the major reason was lack of training, not just on billing tasks, but related to customer service. The results were accounts that were incorrectly set up, wrong procedures being followed, and customer complaints that couldn’t be satisfactorily resolved.

We ironed the kinks out of the procedures and developed and implemented a new training program for customer service reps. It gave them hands-on learning, interactive experience and a chance to deal with “real life” customer scenarios as they learned. Billing problems went down, customer satisfaction went up, procedures and people worked smoothly and effectively.

The benefits were obvious, the answer wasn’t. Ki Group was able to help our client succeed by identifying the true root cause of the problem—not by looking at a snapshot of the billing itself, but at overall training. In this case, we found the solution hidden in the complexities of the bigger picture.