Companies frequently just issue notices that something is changing - for example, that a particular telephone fee is going up, or your credit terms are changing, etc. In those cases, they are just notifying me, they don’t ask me to check a box saying I understand what is changing.
In contrast., it seems that companies that want to go to e-invoicing go out of their way to get your permission to stop sending you paper invoices. Why is that? Why don’t they ask you to opt-out instead of opting in? Why don’t they just say - “starting with your next statement, your invoices will be available electronically UNLESS you check this box”.
The reason I’m asking is that there is a services company that has about 2,000 customers. All their invoices and statements are sent by postal mail and I am advocating that they, at a minimum, email them as PDF’s instead. They already have about 50% of the emails of their customers.
I am suggesting that in the next billing statement that gets mailed to homes that they print something like this in a paper billing flyer: "We will be emailing you your next statement instead of sending it by postal mail. The email address we have on file is _________ - please correct or fill-in if necessary. If you would still like to get your statements and invoices by postal mail place, or if you would like to correct your email address, check this box. IF WE DON"T FROM YOU, YOUR NEXT STATEMENT WILL BE EMAILED INSTEAD OF SENT VIA POSTAL MAIL?
I am thinking the company can move to e-invoicing faster if people have to opt-out of it, vs. having to opt-into it.
Is there any reason this approach can’t be followed? I know there are anti-spam laws, but the company obviously has a business relationship with the customers.
I have about 12 business customers that still have no email address for their business. a ton more that have something like [EMAIL=“name.business@aol.com”]name.business@aol.com
Give it another 10 years or so and email is going to be the norm, people without email/electronic billing access will find themselves slowly becoming punished in the form of higher prices for refusing to comply.
Email is very unreliable IMHO. Sometimes stuff gets caught in spam filters, sometimes it goes through. Not everyone knows how/where to add an address to a whitelist.
I’m spending time chasing down overdue payments at least once a month now, from emails that were supposedly lost in the ether. And this is like 1 out of 6 clients who get pdf invoices.
I realize that physical mail can get lost too but I wouldn’t want to rely on people getting/checking/remembering email for my business’s income.
Yeah, the company could make the transition more quickly, but many people procrastinate about sending back things like you suggest (I’m one of 'em), so your compliance rate will be a lot lower than you would like. Suddenly, a much larger proportion of your bills will be going unpaid, merely because many of your customers forgot to send in the correct email address or to tell you to ‘keep sending paper, I never check that email address’.
Opt-in, while taking longer to implement, results in every customer who’s about to transition to email billing knowing that they are about to transition, and acting accordingly. Opt-out on the other hand, results in a much more confused transition, with lots of late fees and unpaid bills during the process. That tends to piss off the customer, and the employees who have to straighten out the mess, and the process of straightening out the mess may take longer than the opt-in process.