I’m underwhelmed with the amount of mailings I get, and pop-ups every time I log into a vendor’s site, encouraging me to use paperless billing.
But they don’t actually solve my paperless billing problems. The universally offer me terms like:
- We’ll tell you when it’s ready
- You log into our site and can download it, using yet another username and password, instead of my two-factor way-more-secure Google Credentials?
- It’ll be available for 12 months, or whatever term we define, regardless of what you may need.
- We give you nothing at all for opting into to this service that saves us money. But we’ll try to call it “green” because we think that’ll work.
Absolutely none of that solves any real problem for me. Nothing.
I use FileThis.com. It’s a great service that logs into the vendor sites and downloads my bill or statement to my Dropbox, where it will exist forever. I happily pay $20 a year for this, so I don’t have to scan anything. That’s $20 a year I’m paying for a product that wouldn’t need to exist if anybody that actually generated paperwork for me would have the common sense to include what customers really need:
- Lifetime (or at least 5-year) access to my bills. My username for a former healthcare company (UnitedHeathCare is officially “Deleted 11-06-2012 username” Suffice to say I have no online access to any former explanation of benefits.
- Frictionless delivery; either as an e-mail attachment or to Dropbox or Google Drive,
- Some notification that it’s been delivered. I’m content with an email, but OK with a Dropbox alert frankly too.
I don’t think I’m hard to please; I’m a pragmatist, and I’m elated that somebody like FileThis can make money because most of the people producing bills aren’t willing to solve the real problem that users have. That’s the beauty of recognizing opportunity in this country.
I know I’ve been very far behind in posting new things; I have quite a few queued up and will get back on track shortly.