Will the Check Be in the Mail? An Examination of Paper and Electronic Transactional Mail

We collaborated with the consulting firm InfoTrends to analyze three months’ worth of customer billing data from a major U.S. utility. We also jointly interviewed executives who manage bill delivery and payment processing to help determine how the utility’s delivery-and-payment costs and customer preferences compare with those at other utilities and even in other industries. This white paper details how we found that despite a clear preference to pay bills online, 91 percent of customers prefer receiving their bills by mail. Even among the utility’s newest customers — those expected to be more digitally savvy — an average of 89 percent opted to have their bills mailed to them, though, like the others, most preferred paying online.