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Electronic Bill PaymentElectronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) lets organizations present bills and receive payment over the Internet. With EBPP, customers can view, store, and pay bills using a web browser or personal financial management software.EBPP can answer routine billing questions by providing payment history and billing details on demand. Customers receive email responses to their questions, and the customer care staff gains time to handle urgent and complex issues more efficiently. Sophisticated EBPP systems can let customers analyze, dispute, or recalculate their bills. Traditional billing is a non-strategic function, frequently outsourced to reduce costs. EBPP uses billing to increase customer loyalty through customer relationship management. Traditional billing is operated as a cost center, focused on reducing expenses. EBPP may provide a revenue opportunities through targeted marketing and sales of advertising space. Customer profiles, provided by an EBPP system, can be used to automatically select goods and services that the customer is likely to be interested in. Companies in the financial services, telecommunications, and utilities sectors are looking to EBPP for cost savings, building customer loyalty, and new revenue opportunities. They want to use EBPP to improve customer care, allow targeted marketing programs, cross-sell products and services, and reduce costs. The biggest challenge when implementing EBPP is to ensure a sufficient volume of customers to justify the system's cost and leverage its dynamic marketing opportunities. For this reason scalability is a primary issue. To get some idea of the scale involved in creating an EBPP site, a large billing organization may have 30 million customers. Transactions may tend to be concentrated around certain times during the day and days of the month . With only 10% of these users online, the number of transactions could peak at over 5,000 transactions per minute.
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