The Truth About the Bill Payment Experience: A Conversation with Forrester’s Lily Varon and CSG’s Keith Wilson | CSG
AI agents in billing
The Truth About the Bill Payment Experience: A Conversation with Forrester’s Lily Varon and CSG’s Keith Wilson
CSG Insights TeamAuthor
2025-11-14
Bill payment is more than a transactional moment. In some industries, it’s the only regular interaction the customer has with the brand. When the bill payment experience is smooth, it builds trust and loyalty. When it’s not, brands risk delayed payments, costly customer care calls and churn. In fact, billing and payment issues can account for as much as 50% of businesses’ inbound customer service calls, according to a CSG study.
In a recent webinar, “Beyond the Obvious—Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore the Billing Experience,” guest speaker Lily Varon, a Forrester principal analyst, joined Keith Wilson, Executive Director of Product Management for Customer Experience at CSG, and they discussed bill payment pitfalls and strategies to overcome them.
Their dialogue covered:
Hidden friction: pain points in the digital bill payment experience
The high cost of payment friction
Best practices to improve the bill payment journey
The role of AI agents in the bill payment experience
Keep reading for the major takeaways.
The Costliest CX Problems Are the Ones You Can’t See
Keith opened the discussion by noting that brands have more customer data than ever and often fail to use it to truly understand behavior or spot friction in customer journeys. Aggregate metrics dashboards and customer relationship management (CRM) systems aren’t real-time behavioral insights. As he explained, metrics don’t tell you how customers are interacting with the brand across all channels. If businesses can’t see what customers are doing when they engage in a bill pay journey—and where they fail to take action—businesses will struggle to improve the experience.
For example, the first call resolution (FCR) rates may look good when they belie serious experience flaws. Lily cited Forrester research indicating that 81% of customers who called about a payment or billing issue got it resolved in the first call (according to data from Forrester’s March 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey).
“That paints a sunny picture, but it’s a data point lacking context,” she explained. According to that same study, only 41% of customers who called about a payment or billing issue said they encountered no challenges in getting their issue resolved. Metrics like FCR don’t reveal what happened leading up to the call (e.g., the customer spent 20 minutes on the website trying to figure out how to pay on the app) or what friction they encountered during that single, ultimately “successful” call (e.g., they got transferred three times before finally getting help).
Lily shared Forrester data showing that 53% of U.S. online adults called a company about a billing or payments issue in the last 12 months. The top three reasons were to:
1) make a payment (21%)
2) dispute a charge (11%)
3) get help with a login or payment issue (10%)
Both speakers emphasized that these calls can be prevented with stronger self-service tools and smarter digital bill payment tactics.
Lily and Keith agreed that customers aren’t calling about payment issues because they’re stuck in their old ways (i.e., they’ve been paying by phone for 20 years, so they keep doing what they know).
“It's really easy to say ‘old habits die hard,’” Lily said. “This not an old-habits-die-hard thing.” As mentioned, Forrester’s March 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey found that 53% of U.S. online adults—across age groups—called about a billing or payment issue in the last year. For those under 35, it’s 54%. Younger consumers make calls for the same reasons as everyone else, Lily noted.
The speakers also highlighted the importance of a smooth log-in/authentication process. Lily said about 10% of U.S. consumers who receive paper bills (from their utilities, telecom or mobile phone service providers) do so because they can’t remember their online account passwords.
If a customer is logging into the payment portal for the first time, they may get stuck in a “doom loop of authentication,” Keith said. This is a cycle where customers are unable to successfully log in or authenticate themselves when trying to access billing or payment portals—which often is “just a failure of communications,” Keith added
The High Cost of Friction in the Bill Payment Experience
“Billing is the brand's truth serum,” Keith said. When the bill shows up, customers appraise whether the service is worth it. If payment interactions are rocky and brands aren’t proactive in solving problems, trust erodes. Lily and Keith described several negative consequences of payment friction:
Higher operational expenses
Payment-related contact center calls are expensive. “If you get the upstream communications wrong, you only end up with longer calls because people are all the more confused,” said Keith.
Reduced cash flow and revenue
Payment friction can lead to delayed payments and lost business.
Churn
Missed payments can lead to service disconnection (involuntary churn) and lost customer lifetime value.
Damaged brand reputation
According to the Forrester March 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey, 17% of customers who called about a billing or payment issue told their friends or family about the bad experience.
Four Strategies to Improve the Bill Payment Experience
Lily and Keith discussed several strategies to reduce bill payment friction:
1. Partner with billing and payment experts
Lily recommended overhauling foundational data and investing in technology such as customer journey analytics . Short of that, businesses can also use analyst data to start building frameworks for better bill payment journeys.
Not presenting the amount due as the most prominent information
Not providing a clear due date
Not linking the amount due and a clear due date
Not explaining changes (or acknowledging no changes) since the last bill
Hiding mission-critical information (such as the sender of the bill, amount due, clear due date, date range for services billed)
3. Use self-service technologies that remove authentication friction
Both speakers highlighted solutions such as guest checkout via payment portal and encrypted payment links for secure, one-time payments.
4. Tailor communication strategies to individual journeys and channel preferences
Lily noted that one size doesn’t fit all. Forrester found that younger customers (Gen Z and Millennials) don’t have clear communication channel preferences. For example, Millennials prefer to communicate with customer service representatives via email (53% of respondents), chat (46%), voice call (40%), and text (36%). According to Keith, CX teams “have to anticipate and continue to support multiple paths and ways to get multiple kinds of things done.”
The Role of AI Agents in the Bill Payment Experience
Lily and Keith explored how AI agents in billing are beginning to personalize the bill payment experience. Agentic AI achieves a goal by executing a task and making decisions rather than just responding to prompts. Keith explained: “What if instead of only responding to prompts [like generative AI does], we gave AI the agency to do things?”
Lily pointed out that companies sending recurring bills will first be using AI agents to interact with customers rather than act fully on their behalf.
“We are farther from a customer using an agent to make a payment—that is still further down the line,” Lily said. The likelier near-term use cases might be for an AI agent to dispute a charge on the customer’s behalf, she added, or to call the customer when a human agent is ready to assist them.
Keith described how CSG has already developed tools that put AI agents in billing to work delivering proactive, personalized support. A payment reminder agent sends timely, empathetic reminders that offer flexible options (e.g., personalized payment plans). A bill explainer agent clarifies bills—and changes in them—in plain language before customers even need to ask.
Ultimately, AI can help brands deliver personalized, seamless bill payment experiences— but only if the bill payment experience and underlying processes are solid first.
“When your billing is transparent and intuitive, AI agents become allies that reinforce trust,” Keith said. “But when you get it wrong, they become vulnerabilities that expose flaws.”
