Ever get an email from any one of your banks, telecoms or utility companies urging you to be green and sign up for paperless billing? Most likely you would have received something via snail mail with a pimped out flyer promoting GREEN, sign up today! Save trees, yadda yadda yadda.
As a person forever buried under paper, I think it's a great idea, and yes, good for the environment if indeed it results in cutting down (pardon the pun) the use of paper and subsequently, trees. It can also be convenient, if done right.
However, two points to note.
Firstly, it results in significant savings to the underlying company. I used to work at a Telco, I know physical bill production and mailing expenses are significant, yet oddly none of these cost saving are passed on to us, the end consumer. Right, I forgot, our feel good message from the company was save trees, not save them millions.
So, being the good, green citizen that I am I signed up for paperless billing at Verizon for my broadband Internet account.
As fate would have it, a year later I ended up moving out of the state, to an area no longer served by Verizon for Internet service. That leads me to my second point. What I discovered, to my dismay, and dare I say shock, is that when you're no longer a Verizon client they delete your records, so you can't even access your previous billing information, at a later date, e.g., for tax purposes. Further, there was no e-download of the bill. I did however get some great advice from the Verizon rep on the other end of the phone, wait for it......"print off your previous years invoices". So much for being green. Call me cynical but it is this not a prime example of corporate BS? Selling the value of green and environmental, when indeed, it is merely a cost savings NOT passed on to us, the consumer, nor green in the end, if you need to access those records. And, to cap it off, you end up paying to have it printed!
Honestly, I don't know where even to start with this one. Memory and storage space are a commodity these days, it's not like a company can argue it's a cost thing to maintain a billing record for a few years? Especially since it's saving them a few dollars every month for every physical bill not mailed. This just seems to cliche'ly bad. And the call rep couldn't even see the irony on the other end, she thought she was offering me a good solution.
So for today, Verizon, you get the "bird".
Email (save trees) Verizon's customer service people and demand that records and accounts be maintained for at least 5 years, even if you are no longer a client.
Click here to go to their contact us page and send them a note!
Thank you.
Morley Brown
