Telecom to charge $1.50 for paper bills

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom to charge $1.50 for paper bills

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chevrolux

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#1004707 13-Mar-2014 10:00

So are people happy to receive bills by email? (Ok, Telecom has MyTelecom, but a lot of orgs just email bills) What come back do you have if the email doesn't arrive? I've never had a posted invoice go missing but emails regularly go AWOL. And there is legislated privacy over post, but not email.

I personally get emailed bills from the power company, Snap, Sky and 2Talk. In the 4 years living at my current address (when I signed up for all these accounts) I have never once missed a bill from them. They always get through. Emails go 'AWOL' when people accidentally hit delete or have poor junk mail controls.

Use a good email provider and good automatic sorting controls and you will never miss an email.

richms

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#1004757 13-Mar-2014 11:04

Really email mostly goes AWOL when the person never actually sent it but thinks they can blame email on it not arriving.

I have not had any major issues with bills not arriving, and if they dont you would soon figure it out when getting your accounts in order.

Richard rich.ms

PaulBags

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#1005115 13-Mar-2014 18:42

richms: Really email mostly goes AWOL when the person never actually sent it but thinks they can blame email on it not arriving.

Or claim they never got an email when it was sent, and they're using a decent email service so no reason they shouldn't get it.
Ah trademe, how I loathe thee.

mattwnz

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#1005116 13-Mar-2014 18:45

richms: Really email mostly goes AWOL when the person never actually sent it but thinks they can blame email on it not arriving.

I have not had any major issues with bills not arriving, and if they dont you would soon figure it out when getting your accounts in order.

Or an ISP blocks IPs, resulting in blocked emails that neither bounce back nor get delivered.

plambrechtsen

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#1005277 13-Mar-2014 23:13

TinyTim:
old3eyes:

Yeah. This reminds me of the discussion last year on the size of the emailed PDF bill file. It went on and on..

So are people happy to receive bills by email? (Ok, Telecom has MyTelecom, but a lot of orgs just email bills) What come back do you have if the email doesn't arrive? I've never had a posted invoice go missing but emails regularly go AWOL. And there is legislated privacy over post, but not email.

So... You need to sign up to MyTelecom to enable online billing (since that's how we know what your email address to send it to is...)

And in MyTelecom you can also check up to 18 months history of bills (so if one goes AWOL for whatever reason you can still login to MyTelecom)

I'm going to ask the retail team to see how many queries they get from folks saying that their emailed bill got lost.... I would personally suspect the number to be pretty small. Especially because your bill is still accessible in MyTelecom for 18 Months.

I'm still personally struggling to see where the complaints are coming from myself.

tardtasticx

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#1005296 13-Mar-2014 23:54

What are they even going to use the $1.50 charges on? Are they going to upgrade their pre-historic billing system?

*checking my last bill*
"Oh lets see how much data I used... 1318 calls. Sounds about right. "

My phone was showing over 1.5GB usage, I have 2GB/month to use.

Kyanar

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#1005429 14-Mar-2014 10:53

Never had an issue with Telecom bills by email going missing, but Sky TV bills almost never arrive, same with Orcon. Personally, where paper billing is an option I opt for it. Email bills are just too damn dodgy.

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rayonline

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#1008882 19-Mar-2014 11:56

Sure those who only have a landline still get invoices. But looking at the wider picture. Families that are not IT savy or busy families who miss payment on time will be affected. A letter mailed out is a physical reminder. These days me and my peers spend less and less on email and more with FB and Wechat etc ... The Kiwibank has a zero fee CC without invoices and I have been affected on more than one occasion and there goes the penalty fees. Without auto payment could anyone gaurantee they would pay the bill on time every month, every year? It won't surprise me if Telecom forecast that some customers will choose to pay the $1.50 every month and that some customers will miss payment on time - thus there would be additional revenue.

richms

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#1008912 19-Mar-2014 12:19

So those of us not disorganized are expected to subsidise reminders for those who are? Not that hard to put a reminder in your calendar.

Richard rich.ms

Jas777

838 posts

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#1008914 19-Mar-2014 12:26

richms,

So true, if someone wants a service that cost more to produce then they can pay for it. Simple as that.

rayonline

1734 posts

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#1008915 19-Mar-2014 12:29

There are no savings to the customer. For the same price, they don't get invoices. If they wanted the same as before they get charged more. The only winner is Telecom. I doubt it but one could argue that if Telecom is saving on post, they might delay future price increases for the products?

Looking at all the demographics, this is an opportunity to make more revenue.
How long is the piece of string. We could follow some countries who choose not to provide toilet paper in public toilets and it's up to the individual to organise them for themselves.

But then again you may have family where the adults don't know how to use the internet like my parents but the children may need the internet for school work.

plambrechtsen

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#1008964 19-Mar-2014 13:39

rayonline: There are no savings to the customer. For the same price, they don't get invoices. If they wanted the same as before they get charged more. The only winner is Telecom. I doubt it but one could argue that if Telecom is saving on post, they might delay future price increases for the products?

Looking at all the demographics, this is an opportunity to make more revenue.
How long is the piece of string. We could follow some countries who choose not to provide toilet paper in public toilets and it's up to the individual to organise them for themselves.

But then again you may have family where the adults don't know how to use the internet like my parents but the children may need the internet for school work.

My personal view is if someone already has internet access, it's extremely unlikely that they won't have some sort of email address. In regards to the approach of giving everyone who has signed up a $1.50 discount, or charging the folks that haven't I'm in two minds. One encourages people who haven't moved to online billing whereas the other sets up a situation where you would always be giving a discount for online and face a backlash if you ever wanted to take it away.

Can we all agree that online billing rather than killing trees is the future? And if that is the future, when is the right time to move? Now, tomorrow, next year, 5 years from now?

Vodafone has already done this back in 2008 and yes there was pain, but I believe the vast majority of their customers now use online billing. So why beatup Telecom for following suit 6 years later?

rayonline

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#1009007 19-Mar-2014 14:28

The future is the future and this minority group would get smaller but it would always be there.

With my parents we don't even think of getting them Smartphones b/c they cannot use it. Sure you have all the apps like WhatsApp which uses the person's phone number, much easier than Skype to save money but my lots just continue to purchase telephone calling cards. In my 30s now so can be trusted, I've organised email addresses for them but they don't use it, they cannot anyway, so it's just used for some loyalty programmes like Flybuys and purchase of rubbish bin collection b/c it was cheaper online but I do it on behalf of them.

Turning the clock back 15yrs, we would simply had to pay the $1.50 every month. We didn't have other people living with us or those that do very frequent visits. Someone could have set up a auto payment and get them an email address but they wouldn't know the amount until they saw it on their bank statement or a mini statement at the ATM machine.

I've been managing their prepay cellphone balances. If I was not here I imagine that they would just go to the cellphone store and get the store to do the top up for them after the purchase. Say each 12 months which is the required time frame or earlier should the phone run out of credit.

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