A visit with Astrid Strømnes, Interim Head of Data & Personalization Marketing, SBB

“Are you lost?” asks Astrid Strømnes, greeting us. But before we can answer, she has already disappeared into the building. We’re at the SBB in Bern Wankdorf, and it's immediately clear: Federal enterprise or not, there’s no dawdling here. (By the way, we didn’t get lost, we just walked here at a rather leisurely pace.)

Astrid Strømnes (45) works in marketing for SBB Passenger Traffic, currently as a maternity replacement for a team leader. On top of that, “there’s still some of my actual work,” she says. She has a lot going on, but she doesn’t seem fazed at all.

So, we hurry behind Strømnes into a new SBB building – lots of glass, lots of concrete – and enter a windowless meeting room where “the customer” is already waiting for us: On the back of a chair hangs a sash with a face and the inscription, “As-tu pensé à moi?” (“Have you thought of me?”). “This spirit customer helps us a lot,” says Strømnes. “In meetings, we regularly look at her and ask ourselves if we are doing what is best for her.”

Today we’re discussing eBill. Fortunately, “the customer is very happy about this,” laughs Strømnes, “because this way of paying is by far the quickest and most convenient, secure, and sustainable.” Like the customers, invoice issuers are delighted, she says. Why? “Paper invoices are expensive, unsustainable, and prone to errors. E-mail invoicing fixes only a few of those drawbacks; for example, it’s not much better in terms of being a source of errors: Many customers print their invoices out, type them up, or take them to the post office.”

Per eBill invoice, SBB saves 30 centimes compared to a paper invoice, according to an internal study. “But it's probably a lot more,” says Strømnes, because in addition to the direct costs of an invoice, such as paper, envelopes, and shipping, eBill generates fewer reminders and virtually eliminates errors. These two points are enormously important, because “every time an employee has to intervene, it gets expensive”. By the way: Most reminders are issued for e-mail invoices, because they often get lost in the mailbox.

SBB is an eBill pioneer: It has been using digital invoicing since 2007, making it one of the very first companies to do so. It is also one of the largest invoice issuers in Switzerland: “Every year, we send out more than six million invoices to Half-Fare and GA Travelcard holders, the latter often paying in monthly installments,” says Strømnes. “With this volume, we have a great interest in making our invoicing as efficient as possible.”

Although SBB still sends 2.67 million invoices – just over 60% – on paper, efforts to persuade customers to switch are having an impact: While only 6% of SBB customers paid their invoices with eBill in 2021, 22.5% do so today. By comparison, the average for all companies that use eBill is 5%. How did SBB achieve this?

Nicole Tschanz joins us at exactly the right time. She was there when SBB signed the contracts for eBill with SIX. She explains: “Our team developed three measures to persuade our customers to switch.” First, just before customers receive their print invoice, they are sent an e-mail asking them to switch. “This helped us convince 5% to switch,” Tschanz says. Second, with the invoice itself, SBB sends an insert that provides information about eBill, and a contest. Some 8% were successfully converted in this way. Third, “eBill now offers the possibility of automatically finding and adding invoice issuers,” Tschanz explains. “Thanks to this ‘look-up function’, around 20,000 customers convert to eBill every month.”

Nicole Tschanz excuses herself as she has to attend her next meeting. The measures she mentions fall into the “carrot” category. Charging a fee for paper invoices, as many telecom companies, banks or insurance companies do, is currently out of the question for SBB. “The ‘stick’ does not suit us as a federally owned company,” says Strømnes.

Many who impose such a “penalty fee” argue that they are protecting the environment. “It’s true, of course, that an electronic invoice has a much smaller impact on the environment. That’s why we have to get rid of paper invoices at some point,” says Strømnes. But an SBB customer survey has shown that this argument is less important to customers than convenience. “That’s why we’re trying to show that paying with eBill is much easier. And it’s true: without eBill, you’re definitely missing out,” says Strømnes.

Time is up, the meeting room is needed, and Strømnes has to get to her next appointment. For the future, she hopes that as many companies as possible will use eBill, because “it makes the cake bigger for everyone. SBB is also considering making its invoices TWINT-compatible in the future.

We head for the exit. “Those were good questions,” says Strømnes – and off she goes.