Case Study

Delivering better billing experiences at Australia Post

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Objectives

As part of a major transformation, Australia Post identified the importance of its billing operations and was determined to dramatically improve it to enhance customer experience and increase employee engagement.

To support this, Bevington Group was engaged to:

  • Undertake an end-to-end review of billing and credit note processes, right back to their source inputs
  • Identify where things go wrong, and key opportunities to improve the billing experience for customers and staff
  • Collaboratively develop solutions across identified issue/opportunity areas – covering process, role, structure, systems, metrics, and other relevant operating model elements
  • Develop a pragmatic improvement roadmap, covering both immediate opportunities and longer-term strategic changes
  • Support with planning and implementation of quick win initiatives, including gathering business requirements, and providing inputs into business case development for longer term changes

Challenges

  • Poor customer experience arising from billing errors and issues
  • High degree of preventable credit notes being issued to customers
  • Personnel cost associated with resolving customer queries and issues

“Customers come to us when they are frustrated and getting nowhere with their dispute”​
“The issues prevent our customers getting on with their business”​
“If I had more time I could get us more business”​​
“A lot of the admin tasks we do are just box ticking exercises and they take us away from the true customer issue”​

Approach

Staff and management participated in several collaborative solution generation sessions, during which they identified a series of tactical solutions, strategic priorities, and radical long-term changes.

Bevington Group interviewed employees and customers to capture bottom up insight in detail

90 staff across end-to-end teams
573 FTE represented in the data
5,000 current state activity steps captured
100 customers NPS verbatim analysed
11 customers interviewe

Findings

Over half of the total process effort was characterised as waste (non-value add)

The key challenges found related to failure demand including:

  • Poor information quality, flow and visibility
  • Unclear/fragmented responsibilities and accountabilities
  • System and technology limitations
  • Long elapsed time to resolve customer queries

Our recommendations

Six workstreams were proposed to deliver the target state

Customer self-service enablement
To simplify billing information and support that is easy for customers to use, access and control
Process, roles, and responsibilities
To maximise first time right, and achieve fast and effective dispute resolution
System enhancements and automation
To ensure errors are prevented, detected early, and proactively managed
Product and pricing policy
That support simplified invoices and a reduction in disputes
Operations and infrastructure
That enables accurate and complete billing information
Governance and reporting
To monitor process health and drive continuous improvement using process metrics

Implementation

  • Supported by Bevington, the organisation began delivering Bevington’s recommendations commencing with six prioritised opportunities
  • Bevington also gathered business requirements and provided inputs into business case development for subsequent changes
  • The change program was underpinned by six transformation principles to ensure that billing issues continued to be addressed as other strategic decisions were made across the business

Benefits realised

55% reduction in resolution time
The organisation was able to reduce credit note resolution time by more than half (from 22 days to under 10 days)
New and improved metrics
Designed to track end-to-end process health and measure its success

Client feedback

“Great quality of output, very thorough and critical thinkers. Were able to provide really valuable insights to make decisions”​​
“Bevington team were able to join the dots on a lot of insights and make meaning out of it. ”​
“They are Professional, have the industry knowledge, and understand what best practice looks like – industry leading. Good at building capability with viable outcomes”​​
“I really liked the practical approach. Bevington team were very customer focused and responsive.”​

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