Monoova evaluated a utility provider’s 200 most recent online reviews, and found that 145 of those 200 reviews were one star. Of those one-star reviews, 12% of them mentioned a negative payments experience.
Whether it’s a credit going to the wrong account, issues with a payment plan schedule, billing errors, or issues regarding duty of care, payments pop up prominently in one-star reviews.
Here are real reviews from Australian utility provider’s Google business accounts, all rated one star:
- " I cancelled my plan but kept being direct debited."
- “My auto-top up was set up then it didn't work. So when I tried to recharge on the app, over the phone, none of these worked either”
- “We have almost $2000 in credits owed to us by [company] after several months and numerous phone calls, credits are still outstanding. Apparently cheques were in the mail.”
Managing payments isn’t easy for any business, but utilities have extra difficulties due to their requirement to have a customer hardship policy in line with the National Energy Retail Law. With the 2023-2024 year seeing a five-year high when it comes to customers in hardship programs, utility providers need all the help they can get for staying on top of these payment challenges.
The Australian payments landscape is evolving, with new technology tackling these issues. Payments providers like Monoova are using the New Payments Platform to build payment experiences that ease the burden for both the customer and the utility provider when it comes to payments.
Identifying customers in need of financial hardship programs, reducing late and failed payments, and cutting negative one-star reviews by 12% might sound too good to be true. Here’s how it’s possible.
Existing payment standards for utilities and why they are declining in popularity
First, we need to understand how we got here. To date, utility bills have been available to pay using trusted payment methods, which offer many advantages but ultimately give rise to dissatisfaction for a variety of reasons:
- Direct debit, where the bill is automatically deducted from the customer’s bank account
Challenges: the lack of speed of processing, coupled with issues of overdrawn accounts and/or rejections due to insufficient funds, is this reason this payment method is commonly a source of customer complaints.
- Card payments, which can also be set to recurring or automated for billing cycles
Challenges: Cards can also be rejected, and if the card is lost, stolen, or expired, the payment method will fail, also leading to the bill remaining unpaid. Higher transaction fees for customers can also lead to dissatisfaction.
- BPAY, where the customer must either save the biller code and reference number or enter it each time they pay a bill
Challenges: complications can occur when the customer may have multiple accounts with one utility provider. For example: using the same utilities provider for multiple properties, their biller codes would be the same (with different references) which can lead to mispayments.
Utility bills have significant influence over customers’ lives. From service being cut off to credit scores being affected, an unpaid bill has big ripple effects.
So what new payment technologies are leading utilities employing to correct this?
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New payment technologies on the rise
The New Payments Platform (NPP) has enabled significant upgrades to payments:
- Real-time, 24/7/365 payments (no more waiting three business days for settlement!)
- Data-rich descriptions and information attached to payments
- API connections, allowing for automations
- Greater security measures, such as account validation
- Funds verification before withdrawing funds from an account
- Greater control over your and your customers’ payments
- Virtual accounts
Utility providers that adopt these new technologies stand to gain a lot. Monoova has built powerful tools on top of the payment rails that help customers and utility finance teams alike.
For utility customers, the funds verification before an automatic payment is made prevents overdrafts, and the API connection and payment automations ensure there’s no errors in the amount withdrawn, no more pesky ABA files with hidden human errors in them! Finally, mispayments (which can still happen for manual, one-off payments) are automatically detected and corrected according to your internal processes. See how mispayment detection and responses can be set up with Monoova here.
For finance teams, there are tools to streamline their work, too:
- automated reconciliation and identification of those mispayments
- near real-time settlement times for improved cashflow and reporting
- reduced administrative burden for disputes and refunds for improved risk management
Customer support teams will also be happy to see less complaints and 1-star reviews mentioning difficult payment experiences!
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From Direct Debit to PayTo
PayTo is one of the payment rails included in the NPP. It’s very similar to Direct Debit in that it is an agreement between a provider and a customer that covers recurring payments of fixed or variable sums along a billing cycle. Where Direct Debit takes up to three business days to transact and can fail if a customer’s account has insufficient funds, PayTo is available 24/7/365 and verifies funds before withdrawing. If there are insufficient funds, Monoova’s integration will send your team a notification.
See more details and comparison between PayTo and Direct Debit in this blog.
When it comes to utility providers specifically, PayTo is a great asset for your duty of care to assist customers who may be experiencing financial hardship. Through funds verification, missed payment notifications, Confirmation of Payee, and Monoova’s transaction monitoring engine, utility customers have extra layers of protection when it comes to paying their bills and keeping their services switched on.
Switching to PayTo makes sense to customers once they understand the benefits. And it is equally important for providers because the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS), which facilitates debit payments through financial institutions, is due to be decommissioned by 2030.
Efficiency makes room for growth
Processing all payments through a single platform provides significant benefits to utility providers.
Offering customers a wider choice of payment methods helps improve customer experience and Monoova makes that easy with a simple set up of one-to-many. That is, Monoova can connect all your current payment options such as BPAY, online card payments, and digital wallets (Google Pay and Apple Pay), as well as PayTo, PayID, direct debit, and virtual accounts. Monoova also offers comprehensive risk mitigation with 3D Secure 2 for cards, enhanced security through Credential-on-File (CoF) tokenisation for future payments, and transaction monitoring.
A single payment processing platform also means that customers can seamlessly move one payment option to another, and most importantly, transition to a modern payment method such as PayTo quickly and easily.
Contact us for further information about how you can take the pain out of utility payment processing. Talk to one of our experts or download our one-page explainer: Payments that Make a Real Difference to see how Monoova can benefit your business.
