Companies have spent years making it easier for customers to pay bills online. They have made less progress helping them fix a bill when something goes wrong.
Four in 10 consumers have had to contact customer support to resolve a billing problem, according to “The Service Commerce Performance Gap,” a PYMNTS Intelligence report produced in collaboration with Paymentus. It is tied with limited control over payment timing as the most commonly reported billing problem in the study.
The finding exposes a self-service gap in billing. Consumers can routinely receive, review and pay bills digitally, but resolving a problem can still require an employee to get involved. That turns billing friction into an operating-cost issue for service providers. A question about a charge, payment status or due date that customers can’t resolve themselves can become a phone call, chat or other customer-service interaction.
The problems sending consumers to support aren’t rare. Thirty-three percent have had trouble understanding a bill or its charges. Thirty-two percent have encountered unexpected fees, while 31% have been unsure whether a payment was successfully completed and the same share have experienced processing delays.
The report doesn’t calculate the customer service cost created by those interactions. But the 40% figure shows how often billing problems can require another layer of servicing after the bill has already been issued. Digitizing a payment isn’t enough. Payment execution scored 72 out of 100 in the report, the highest score among the seven stages of the billing journey. Issue resolution scored 66.
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Billing Self-Service Has Limits
The gap becomes clearer when consumers need something beyond simply making a payment. Most providers offer some flexibility, but customers frequently can’t access it on their own. Seventy-seven percent offer payment extensions or grace periods, yet just 15% make them available through self-service. Seventy percent allow customers to choose a payment date, but only 31% provide that capability through self-service.
Customers are left contacting support for changes that could potentially be handled digitally. Younger consumers encounter the problem most often. Fifty-two percent of Gen Z consumers and 49% of millennials have experienced billing breakdowns requiring customer service, compared with 26% of baby boomers and seniors.
Providers, however, may not see resolution as a major weakness. Only 5% rate their own support team’s ability to resolve billing issues as below ideal. Fourteen percent of consumers rate providers below ideal on the same measure.
Investment is also concentrated elsewhere. Fifty-seven percent of providers are actively investing in bill delivery and 48% in bill review and clarity. Only 19% are investing in payment flexibility, 11% in cross-channel integration and 10% in post-payment and resolution.
There’s a payments consequence as well. Twenty-six percent of consumers have delayed a payment until a billing dispute was resolved, and 23% have deliberately delayed paying because they were dissatisfied.
For service providers, the 40% support figure therefore points to more than customer frustration. Billing problems can create additional servicing work and delay the payment the billing system was designed to collect in the first place.
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