Switch to eBilling SMS Journeys

2-Way SMS to Collect Consent to E-Billing​

EnergyAustralia (EA) is an electricity generation, electricity and gas retailing private company in Australia, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based and listed CLP Group.

Business Challenge

EA was looking to migrate EA customers from receiving their bills in paper form and to take up email billing. The benefits that they were promoting to their customers included:

• Help the environment by reducing paper consumption
• Access and pay bills anytime anywhere
• Reduce paper clutter at home
• Avoid paper bill fees

The Solution

The EA eBilling solution consisted of 3 sign up SMS campaigns, and 2 follow up SMS campaigns for customers with invalid email addresses. These campaigns were used to migrate EA customers from receiving their bills in paper form and to take up email billing.

The resulting acceptance SMS responses, or updated email addresses were automatically transferred back to EA so that they could be automatically applied on the corresponding accounts within the core business systems.

The campaigns were designed as a ‘two-way’ SMS enabling the customer to respond in a number of different ways depending on the wording of the original message.

• Opt-in SMS campaigns required a ‘yes’ (or accepted variations such) response to be successfully classified.
• Opt-out SMS campaigns required a ‘no’ (or accepted variations such) response to be successfully classified.
• In some campaigns the customer could also update their email address by including that in their response.

The follow-up campaigns were sent out with a competition offered as an incentive for customers to switch to eBills.

Inbound Campaign

The Inbound Campaign was quickly and easily set up within the platform to wait for the keyword ‘YES’ followed by an updated email address that would be automatically saved into the customer’s record in Which50 and then transferred securely back to EnergyAustralia as part of the routine data transfers.

The Results

1. Sent out ~860k text messages over a series of months across the 4 different campaigns
2. Over 55,000 customers switched to eBills
   • 23,000 – via Opt-In campaign
   • 32,000 – via Out-Out campaign
3. Over 7,500 email addresses updated
4. If you estimate £1/$1/€1 per postal bill – saving of >50,000 per month for monthly bills
   • Cost of campaign returned in less than 1 month

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