With partner deals, collaborations and relevant messages, mobile operator 3 has transformed its invoice from something that you have to pay into an experience.
“The basic idea is to surprise and to make the invoice a positive experience. One way is to look for business partners that suit our services, for example streamed music or video services, and to join forces to offer things,” says Malin Olsson.
Other common kinds of messages on the invoice might be special offers for a new kind of phone or subscription, or a tip on how the customer can save money.
3 has merged administration and marketing
But they can also be local special offers to customers within certain areas. For example, they recently invited customers living near to the Rival cinema in Stockholm to a free advance screening.
3 has merged administration and marketing to create a new department called Loyalty Management. It means that both product owners and communication are in the same department.
“We’ve always communicated a lot on the invoice. The roles that we have now did exist in the company, but in the past year we’ve streamlined the organisation,” explains David Johansson, who is Product Manager for invoices.
“We call it a transpromo service. The job also involves taking care of communication on covering letters and in text messages,” he says. Malin Olsson doesn’t see the invoice as an individual, unique channel. It’s a part of a bigger package.
“We have 360° thinking. It’s all about reinforcing communication in one channel with more channels, for example we follow up on invoice mailings by text message, Facebook and the like,” she explains. “It’s hard to achieve a hit rate with only one channel. As soon as we have more channels, there’s a domino effect,” says David Johansson.
Customer service, loyalty and additional sales are the three most common kinds of messages that 3 uses on its invoices. The company takes care of all segmentation itself and has plenty of data to work with. Everything from age, place of residence, type of subscription and consumption is neatly stored and easily accessible in the company’s CRM system.
Several different databases
As 3 is a relatively new player in the market, they don’t have several different databases from different parts of the company.
“We really have our system under control, and we feel that we can communicate as we want,” says David Johansson.
At present they have 15 customer groups, 200 unique texts and eight different text surfaces. There are plenty of options for 3’s marketing department to keep track of when they create new campaigns. But a lot of information doesn’t mean that you can send anything at all, all of the time.
“All communication must be relevant for the customer, and the invoice must always feel like something positive,” says Malin Olsson. 70 per cent of 3’s customers still receive a paper invoice. Despite the fact that every invoice costs the end customer SEK 24. And if 3 itself could choose, they’re happy for this to continue.
“We have e-invoices today, but before more people use it we want it to be just as good as the paper invoice. And we’re not there yet,” says Malin Olsson. “We have plenty to develop. Our invoices are still just a pdf file, and we’ve not yet worked out how to get people to open it,” she says, and explains that the relationship between paper and e-invoice isn’t growing as rapidly as in other industries. They don’t have any concrete figures, but are convinced that colour print and segmentation give customers a very good experience.
“We usually get high marks for the invoice in our customer surveys,” says Malin Olsson.