C&W and online billing

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I WRITE in response to a letter published in your newspaper on September 17, which was headlined: 'Utility companies must find new means of contact'.

The letter dealt with the difficulties companies with many utility accounts often experience in keeping track of their bills, especially because bills often are delivered late or, sometimes, not at all.

The writer suggested that one way of dealing with this is that bills be posted on the Internet and made accessible through a Personal Identification Number (PIN). From our perspective, this letter is very timely and provides us at Cable & Wireless an opportunity to inform the public about what we are doing in this regard.

We are painfully aware that bills may be delayed or, at times, lost in transit, and that this causes inconvenience to our customers. As a result, we have explored different approaches to mitigating the problem ­ one such was to hire private contractors to hand deliver bills in several areas.

At the same time, the company has been conducting a pilot project, CW ONLINE using the Internet, that would allow customers not only the ability to view their bills online, but also to report faults and make service requests. Over the past several months, our company has used a small group of customers to test the functionality of the project and to provide useful feedback, and we hope to extend the project to a much wider segment in the very near future.

But we are not stopping there. We are also working on developing innovative new services that will provide bill balance information via a number of new interfaces, for example through mobile phones, Internet kiosks at banks and other payment outlets.

Finally, our office has been in contact with the writer of the letter, whose 30 accounts have now been consolidated into four and he has been included in the CW ONLINE project.

I am etc.,

ERROL K. MILLER

Public Relations Manager

Cable & Wireless

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