One of the things that we look for when deciding if a company has a tuned in approach is the company's back-end processes. Are the simple things like phone support designed for the convenience of the company? Or the convenience of the customer?
Bills and invoices are always an interesting clue to a company's overall behavior. Is the bill easy to understand? Or is it a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make sense and is difficult to read?
Often when a company's bills are difficult to read it is because the company systems are set up for the convenience of the company, not the customer. You can imagine a company CFO directing his finance and IT department to develop a billing system that makes it easy to manage the numbers, all the while forgetting that the company’s customers all need to read and pay the bills.
With all my telecommunications services—landlines, mobile phones, cable Internet access, and the like, I’ve got a bunch of bills from Earthlink, AT&T, Verizon, and others. Most of them are so damn complicated that I just pay them even if they are wrong (maybe some unscrupulous companies count on this behavior?).
Recently I purchased an EVDO datacard and signed up for the Sprint data service at $60 per month. When the first bill arrived, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy to understand the bill is. It tells me what I’ve purchased, the government fees, and other things.
Click the images to see a full size version of two pages of the bill.
Simple and smart. A tuned in bill.
