How Bill Hero is revolutionizing energy savings with Paperform and Papersign

See how Bill Hero uses Paperform and Papersign to expand its service (and save its customers both money and headaches).

Highlights

• Bill Hero is a subscription service customers use to review their energy bills, find more cost-effective plans or providers, and make the switch to a more affordable service.
• While the company started by helping customers find other options, it’s now rolling out a new service that helps customers switch to those plans. Bill Hero uses Paperform to enroll new customers and collect necessary information and uses Papersign to collect signatures on important documents.
• Bill Hero loves that Paperform and Papersign grow with their business and automate workflows, while also offering top-notch security, helpful support, and affordable prices.

Overview

1. Challenge: Getting in the weeds with customers’ energy bills can be complex, especially at scale. Bill Hero needed a form and signature solution that was simple, but able to be integrated with the company’s existing automations and ecosystem.
2. Solution: Bill Hero opted for Paperform to enroll new customers and has stuck with the solution for years. Once Papersign was released, Bill Hero started using it to autofill documents and collect customer signatures on “letters of authority,” which are required in the energy industry.
3. Results: For Bill Hero, Paperform and Papersign weren’t just temporary solutions—they’re apps that have supported the business’ growth and evolution, particularly when rolling out a new service. Bill Hero also loves that Paperform and Papersign save the team countless hours when scaling to thousands of customers.

About

With the ongoing cost of living crisis, customers are more price-sensitive than they were before. But sticker shock doesn’t change the fact that reviewing your bills (and finding cheaper options) is a pain.

That’s where Bill Hero comes in. It’s a solution that does the grunt work for you by reviewing your energy bills and presenting you with more cost-effective solutions. Soon, Bill Hero will even help you make the switch to a new plan or provider.

Bill Hero started by focusing exclusively on energy bills due to their complexity. “What we’ve found in energy is that households already find it too difficult to understand and compare between energy plans. That’s why so many of us put it off indefinitely,” explains Richard Foxworthy, Bill Hero’s Co-founder and CEO.

Unfortunately, that’s something that retailers count on. “Retailers routinely rely on the fact that most energy consumers find it too hard and too boring and too difficult to pay close attention to their bills,” Richard continues. “So they ratchet the price up over time.”

That hits customers right where it hurts: their wallets. And that’s exactly what Bill Hero aims to solve by helping customers find more affordable choices. Customers can even set their own “bothered threshold,” which is the amount of savings that would trigger them to actually switch to a new service. “We’ll let you know when that amount is on the table,” Richard says.

Richard admits that there are plenty of other comparison sites and solutions, but Bill Hero does things differently and describes itself as the “next generation in energy comparison.”

That’s because most comparison solutions are not-so-cleverly-disguised sales channels for retailers or vendors. That means a limited selection for customers and an experience that’s more of a hard sell than genuine support.

“With Bill Hero, we decided to turn all of that completely on its head,” Richard says, noting that the company knew there was “room in the universe for a truly customer-centric approach to comparison.”

So Bill Hero works only for the consumer—not the vendors or retailers. The consumer is the one paying for Bill Hero’s service on a subscription model. That means Bill Hero has free reign to compare every single product from every single retailer and “truly find the product and the plan that gives the best outcome for the consumer,” Richard adds.

The benefit is clear, but Richard says there was still some early concern about whether or not customers would put their hands in their own pockets to pay for a service like this. “Turns out that, yes, they will,” he says.

Plus, Bill Hero offers a savings guarantee to proactively mitigate any doubts or concerns. If Bill Hero can’t find savings that equal the cost of the subscription, they allow customers to walk away with a full refund—no questions asked.

But Richard says that’s exceedingly rare. “Overwhelmingly, when our subscribers sign up, we will find them seven, eight, sometimes 10 or more times the cost of their annual subscription in their very first bill. And then there’s a whole year ahead to continue monitoring bills. It’s not just a one-time solution. It’s an always-on, full-service solution.”

The challenge

Bill Hero’s value proposition is simple (save money!), but making that happen is fairly complex.

It involves collecting customer information, enrolling them in the service, and eventually, auto-populating documents that customers need to sign to permit Bill Hero to act on their behalf.

That challenge is made even more complicated by the fact that Bill Hero’s customer base runs the gamut, with Richard describing them as “everyday households around Australia.”

“They’re old, they’re young, they’re tech-savvy, they’re not tech savvy,” he continues. So, whatever technology tools Bill Hero employs need to be powerful enough to get the job done but also intuitive enough for customers to use without added hassles.

The solution

Fortunately, Bill Hero found Paperform early on. “We did check the market,” Richard says, “But Paperform stood out as doing everything we needed it to do.”

Bill Hero started with the most obvious use case: using Paperform to enroll new subscribers in the Bill Hero service. “We really liked it because it gave us some nice flexibility in presenting those forms and styling them graphically,” Richard says, adding that they also liked the features for automating and pre-populating certain fields.

Bill Hero also initially used the Stripe integration to provide an easy checkout process for customers. “It’s always been a good, reliable, easy-to-use experience for us,” Richard shares.

It’s always been a good, reliable, easy-to-use experience for us.

Because of that, Bill Hero’s use of Paperform has continued to increase—even opting for Papersign when it came time for Bill Hero to expand its service. Here are a few of the reasons why Bill Hero has stuck around.

1. Simple but powerful workflows

Bill Hero’s model is evolving. Soon, the company plans to help customers not just find more cost-effective plans but make the switch to those plans. Because of that, the company needs more from its solutions.

That’s why Richard was thrilled with the recent release of Papersign, which proved to be the perfect complement to Bill Hero’s new offerings.

Bill Hero will use Paperform and Papersign together to collect necessary customer information and populate what’s called a “letter of authority.” That’s a document that an energy customer needs to sign to agree to let an external party (in this case, Bill Hero) act as their agent, conduct certain activities, and engage with retailers.

“It’s always been a challenge for us to do this at scale with individual consumers because you do need to have these individual agreements set up and signed,” Richard explains. “Papersign has made it very, very simple for us to scale to a large number of individual consumers.”

Papersign has made it very, very simple for us to scale to a large number of individual consumers.

Because Bill Hero receives its customers’ energy bills, it’s straightforward to pre-populate forms with that information. That way, customers only need to update any necessary fields in Paperform. That information is then piped through to the letter of authority in Papersign—all with very little intervention from the customer.

“With the solution that we have now in place, the level of effort has been reduced almost to zero because we can fill those forms almost completely on behalf of our subscribers,” Richard says. “All they need to do is click the button.”

2. Solutions that grow with the business

The move to using Paperform with Papersign is just one symptom of Bill Hero’s broader ethos: using automation wherever it can.

“We’re very, very much focused on automation,” Richard explains. “We’re a small team. We’re delivering a direct-to-consumer experience that has a great deal of detail and precision. And it recurs.”

Needless to say, it can be cumbersome to manage, especially when you consider that most customers have monthly billing cycles. If Bill Hero is monitoring both their electricity and gas bills, that’s 24 bills a year for each subscriber, multiplied by thousands of subscribers.

That means automation isn’t just a nicety. It’s a necessity. Bill Hero built an entire automation process for receiving customers' bills, taking in that information, and auto-forwarding bills to customers. “That’s our mechanism for ingesting bills into the system without the customer having to even think about it or lift a finger,” says Richard.

“We look for high-quality tools and components that we can bring into our ecosystem,” he continues. “We can rely on them to deliver the process and function and interact with the other parts of our platform through APIs typically in a way that’s scalable and reliable.”

With its new service, Bill Hero closes the loop on the customer experience by helping consumers not just find new providers but switch to them—something the company couldn’t do without Paperform and Papersign.

“They appreciate the holistic, end-to-end value proposition,” Richard adds about Bill Hero’s customers.

3. Reliable and customizable security measures

Considering that Bill Hero is elbow-deep in customers’ bills, it goes without saying that they have access to a lot of potentially sensitive information. Customers’ addresses, driver’s license numbers or other forms of identification, payment information…the list goes on.

Both Bill Hero and its customers need to know that their personal details are safe. Fortunately, Richard says that’s something he never has to worry about with Paperform.

“Another thing we like about Paperform is that it’s got good security and we can specify things,” he explains. “For example, not saving the data in Paperform.”

Instead, Bill Hero saves that information to its own system where it’s encrypted and stored in the company’s database.

Not every form solution gives you that level of control over the data, and that customization helps provide some added peace of mind for Bill Hero's customers.

4. Affordable price points

Bill Hero helps customers save money—and the company is understandably focused on the same thing internally. “It’s a low-margin, high-volume business,” Richard says.

For that reason, Bill Hero is fairly price-sensitive when evaluating tools and solutions. “We’ve been pleased with the pricing model that Paperform has used,” he adds. “And Papersign makes electronic document signing far more accessible than it’s been traditionally.”

Papersign makes electronic document signing far more accessible than it’s been traditionally.

With the upcoming new service and the need for letters of authority, Richard says he evaluated all of the major players in the world of esignatures but quickly realized that they all “tend to be much heavier and more expensive types of solutions,” while noting that they’re also more difficult to integrate.

“We see Papersign as a nice, straightforward, lightweight solution,” he adds.

5. Friendly and helpful customer support

Every now and then, Richard has an interesting use case for Paperform or Papersign and needs help from customer support to figure it out. “Your support guys were awesome,” he says, referencing one specific time he had a particularly unique challenge.

“They went away and did some research and we exchanged messages over the course of pretty much a full day,” Richard continues. “And at the end, we found a resolution.”

Richard recognizes that not every support team would stay so dedicated and invested in finding the answer, and that commitment is just one more thing he appreciates about both Paperform and Papersign.

The results

While Bill Hero’s business is changing, its love for Paperform hasn’t. And it’s easy to see why—Paperform has helped Bill Hero achieve some impressive results:

• The release of Papersign made it easier for Bill Hero to expand its offering and help customers not only find but switch to more cost-effective services. That process would have been far more complex without the Paperform and Papersign integration.
• Bill Hero also found that Paperform and Papersign made it super quick to build a proof of concept for that new service they’re deploying soon, with Richard noting that it only took a week and a half to implement the processes.
• Paperform is customizable enough for Bill Hero to collect the necessary information and understand different nuances and situations of energy customers. “All of those scenarios, all of those permutations and edge cases, we can handle all of them within Paperform in a straightforward, clean, and simple way,” Richard says.

For that reason, Richard says Bill Hero is with Paperform and Papersign for the long haul. “We’ve been happy with the product the whole time. So there’s been no real reason to look elsewhere,” Richard says.

We’ve been happy with the product the whole time. So there’s been no real reason to look elsewhere.

A business built on saving money

Most businesses rely on customers spending more money—not saving it. But Bill Hero does things differently, with a mission of helping consumers save some hard-earned cash on their energy costs.

“We think that money can be better spent on things that are way more fun and way more interesting than energy,” Richard concludes. “So we’d love it if you came to Bill Hero and let us do that energy comparison for you.”

And while you’re in the mindset of saving yourself some money, how about also saving yourself some time? Sign up for Paperform and Papersign for free (no credit card required) and see all of the ways we can streamline your workflows and cut hours out of your workday. After all, time is money.