Revenue Journal®

I've been a Verizon customer for years. I stayed "loyal" for a long time, partly because switching carriers is such a pain. I also stuck around because their service was reliable and their customer service people were helpful.

But, I'm not loyal anymore. I'm leaving.

Why? For the stupidest reason: They won't let me pay them. Yep, that's right.

Customer web task guru Gerry McGovern and I have been talking a lot lately. I know he would agree when I say that making it possible for customers to pay is an "essential" task. In my role as a revenue coach, I would say that "getting paid" has a direct and dominating effect on your revenue. Booked business doesn't turn into revenue until you're paid.

Have you paid attention to how easy or difficult it is for your customers to pay you? Verizon, a company that is marketing like crazy lately, should take some of that advertising money and spend it on testing and improving its customer web experience. It's as if the competition hired some evil webmaster and placed him inside Verizon to sabotage the customer's experience. The people who work there are still nice, and do what they can, but the company's usability is a disaster.

I pay all my bills online, as most of us do. Most companies make it pretty easy. Allstate, in particular, does a spectacular job at just about everything, including getting paid online. Verizon and Verizon Wireless, on the other hand, have been nothing but trouble over the last six months or so.

The fundamental problem Verizon is having is that they have organized their website by the type of service they offer - or more accurately, by their own internal departments - rather than organizing it to support the customer's experience.

Verizon splits its online accounts first into residential and business categories, with subcategories within each one. If you go to the business account sign-in box, you can't even get in if you don't first select the appropriate sub-category from a confusing and overlapping list of categories: Small Business Phone, Verizon Small Business Center, Wireless and Migrated Customers, My Business Account, and Verizon Enterprise Center. How on earth do they expect you to remember which of these cryptically named categories (which probably change every few months) they assigned you to?

You have to sign in separately to each type of service to pay your bill or manage your account. Allstate, on the other hand, lets you sign in, then shows all of the accounts you have with Allstate - home insurance, auto insurance, and so on. The activity puts the customer at the center, rather than "splitting" the customer into various categories. Paying Allstate takes a couple of clicks each month, and there aren't any questions as you go.

I won't go into a point-by-point account of my struggles to pay Verizon, but I will use them as an example of how not to do it. The point, of course, is that you don't want to make these same mistakes. No one can afford to lose customers - especially loyal ones - these days. You may think you're doing fine in these areas, but you can only be sure if you've been doing user testing all along.

1) Account setup: Make sure it's click-click easy - and includes a way to fix things when they go wrong. I recently changed one of my residential lines to a better number. As I did so, the Verizon agent decided that my residential line was really a business line when they set it up. So when I went to the web to pay the bill online, I couldn't set up an account in the residential section - because the telephone number had been classified as a business line. I kept getting referred to the business section of the website. It took me a number of phone calls, endless periods on hold listening to canned ads telling me how great they are, and something like three months to straighten that out. Too bad that wasn't the end of it.

2) Give them easy access to the details on their statements or invoices. When someone comes to your site to pay a bill, they don't want to have to click down 5 levels to see a detailed bill. They want a clear navigation path. This is especially important for credit card companies and telephone companies, because their customers really need to see the details on their statements.

3) Give them easy access to their payment history. People paying a bill online want to be able to do three things: See itemized charges (to make sure they agree with them); see the details of their last payment to make sure they're not overpaying; and then pay. There are administrative things they must do as well - updating their contact information and the like. But those top three high-priority activities should be front and center.

4) Display up-to-the-minute payment information. The best companies reflect your new payment immediately - as a "pending payment" if they must, but it's on the website right away. Other companies behave as if they are still sending mailed statements. They don't show any payment made until they issue a new statement. So if the customer happens to go there a day early - before a new statement is issued - she can't depend on the data displayed online to pay the right amount. This is especially irritating if she's opted to stop receiving mailed statements. The minute she makes a payment, it should become part of her payment history. Vanguard has one of the best websites (and customer reps), and they just list the latest transaction as "pending," immediately after the customer hits "submit."

5) If you close someone's account, and there are still charges due, send them a proper bill. Don't do something very unfriendly, like sending them to a collection agency. After months of many phone calls and promises, Verizon finally reclassified my residential line as a residential line. In doing so, however, they "closed out" the not-really-a-business line. Their system decided it was a "closed account"...and sent the remaining balance to collection. What final balance, you might ask? Good question, since I still had the line and was still paying bills for the line. The line was the same, but the account number changed, so now that bill - which I had been trying to pay - was now an "overdue closed account." Could I check it online? No - the account was closed, remember? The next thing I got from Verizon was a collection agency form letter. Whoa! I got on the phone right away and paid them right away. Since I was keeping the phone number, it's logical to assume that any charges associated with that number would appear on the invoices for that number, right? No such luck - and no such logic. Someone somewhere is definitely not thinking this stuff through.

That's the real problem. Smooth, frustration-free website transactions take work and thought. All possible transactions have to be mapped carefully. The front end needs to be driven by what the customer wants to do, and the back end needs to make it easy - and not mess it up. Your policies must also make sense, so the customer doesn't become an innocent victim. Customers don't like to be victimized.

How long do we all have to do business on the web before top managers get the message: The usability of your website is more important than anything else you do to "communicate" with customers.

Plus, if you're making it tough for people to pay you - if it is not one-click simple - you're literally throwing revenue away. You paid all that money to attract people to your website, they finally signed up and became customers, and now they're struggling to pay you. It's a revenue crime.

Take some time to test your website, or have someone do it for you. Have them go through the same steps that customers take who are trying to buy from you or pay you. It might be the smartest thing you do in 2010.