MSEB Tops Online Bill Payment Consumer Experience

In the past, I’ve blogged about the friction involved in many Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) systems operated by banks in India and the UK. My recent experiences with those of a leading Indian TELCO and British Financial Services company are no better.

On the other hand, I’ve also raved about some excellent implementations of consumer IT by the public sector.

Let me add Maharashtra State Electricity Board’s EBPP system to the list of the latter – it’s one of the best online bill payment systems I’ve come across.

MSEB is the state-owned power utility for the state of Maharashtra in India. Over the past six months, I’ve been using its online bill payment solution. It tops the consumer experience of any EBPP system that I’ve used so far. And, since MSEB hasn’t pulled the plug out on me – literally – I’m sure its backend is no weakling either.

Accessible from the website of its distribution subsidiary called MahaVitaran – Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL), MSEB’s system is extremely quick and easy-to-use. You don’t have to register and wait for weeks for the first bill to be posted online, as has happened to me with a few other bank-based online bill payment websites. While registration is permitted, it’s not mandatory. If you register, you can access your monthly bill by logging on with your user name and password. But, even if you don’t, all you need to enter are two pieces of information – Consumer # and Billing Unit – that can be found easily on the bill. What’s more, the system supports a wide range of payment methods including credit card, debit card, and bank transfer via Internet Banking. After you make the payment, the website issues a receipt in a choice of rich PDF and plain TXT formats that you can view online, save and print.

In the absence of password protection for viewing bills, it might appear that one person will be able to view another person’s bills. However, consumers, security specialists and privacy advocates alike can rest assured that doing so isn’t that easy: The voyeur will need to know not just the other person’s Consumer # but also his or her Billing Unit. Given that there are tens of millions of consumers and over 1,000 billing units, the chances of anyone correctly guessing a combination of Consumer # and Billing Unit are indeed very low. I was initially wondering why MSEB insists that the user should enter both Consumer # and Billing Unit when a given Consumer # is likely mapped to a unique Billing Unit. I could understand the logic behind this design only when I realized that MSEB has possibly used this simple and ingenious mechanism to plug what would otherwise have been a serious security and privacy hole. This is another example (click here and here to see a few others) that shows that it is possible to build in adequate security and still provide a frictionless online interaction experience to consumers.

If MSEB’s bill payment website has one blemish, it’s a very high downtime. During a recent visit to pay a bill, I was shocked to find that the service was unavailable for three days. Hope MSEB realizes that such a long downtime is unusual for a consumer web application and makes amends going forward.

The icing on the cake is that MSEB doesn’t charge anything extra for its online bill payment service. Given that it provides a highly convenient alternative to visiting its offices and standing in long queues to pay bills by cash or cheque, I’d be willing to fork out around INR 50 per bill.

Please take the poll below to specify how much charges would you be willing to fork out for the facility of paying your monthly electricity bills so easily over the Internet.

[polldaddy poll=4360712]