Alex Burridge, Director – Marketing , Paymentus
Growing up, I often heard the adage that the average American had a house, spouse, and 2.3 kids (with the old joke being that nobody ever met a family with .3 of a kid). Today, that adage could be updated to house, spouse, 2.3 kids, and 12-15 bills to pay per month.*
12-15 is a pretty big pile of competing priorities that your bill is up against.
To make matters more challenging, 60% of Americans pay their bills using one-time payments. Whether due to financial constraints or simply wanting to maintain control over their finances, these customers are unlikely to adopt AutoPay.
So here we have 60% of Americans, who may have up to 15 bills per month, paying each bill manually. That adds up to more than 9 billion times per year that U.S. consumers manually enter account details in an attempt to pay their bills.
Small wonder that the point of user authentication is the single largest point of abandonment within the bill pay experience.
The 80% Challenge
Paymentus data shows that 80% of bill payments are abandoned at login. The point of user authentication, where a user must remember a user name, password, or account details, serves as the biggest roadblock in terms of getting your organization paid.
of bill payments are abandoned at the point of login
It’s likely you’ve experienced this in your personal life, where unknown or forgotten information leads you to delay a payment or purchase. In the world of eCommerce, this isn’t an issue. You can simply pick back up where you left off, with your cart still filled with your items.
In the world of bill pay, however, any delay can lead to late payments, fees, frustration, calls, and lost customers. Unrealized revenue impacts operational performance. Customer service representatives are forced to address payments as opposed to more pressing customer issues.
The stakes are very high and reliant on a large number of bill payers who are already stretched to the max. This is why a fast-pass bill payment experience is fast becoming a necessity.
How to Create a Fast-Pass Experience for Bill Payments
12-15 bills means 12-15 different passwords and usernames, at minimum. If payment information cannot be saved, add that to the mountain of information customers must remember to make a payment.
It’s essential that organizations make bill pay as simple as possible to ensure timely payments, but simple is a relative term. This can be done in several ways:
- Offer customers the ability to pay their bill through a centralized experience that consolidates all of their bills under a single ID.
- Create one location for clients to view, manage, and pay bills. This delivers the convenience that customers have increasingly come to expect from their service providers.
- Don’t ask customers to remember their login information each time they attempt to pay.
- Give one-time payers the ability to make payments through a single click.
Ease Your Customers’ Bill Pay Burdens
The most important thing organizations can do today is to reconsider their idea of simplicity. While you may offer saved payment information, customers still have to log into your site each month if they wish to pay online. You may offer a wide variety of payment options, but if a customer has trouble logging into their account, they won’t care that they can pay using digital wallets.
Simplicity and convenience are all about reducing the amount of clicks and memorization that a customer must endure to pay a bill. Every manual process creates a barrier between you and a payment. A fast-pass experience removes the barriers and replaces them with one-click convenience that cannot be matched by anything on the market today.
For more information on how Paymentus can help you deliver a fast-pass experience to your customers, let’s talk! Our team is excited to demo our patented technology that enables customers to pay bills 4X faster than traditional methods.
* How Americans Pay Their Bills report, 2023
