Only 11% or 150,000 of the 1.4 million customers of NSTAR [1. NSTAR Launches Latest Effort to Help Customers "Go Green" ] have gone paperless by adopting eStatements. You would think this number would be much higher since electric and gas statements are probably the first set of statements you want to go paperless with. The charges are usually around $100 to $200 a month, do not vary much from month to month, there are usually no late fees for forgotten payments and even my grandmother knows that she needs to pay the electric bill every month. In comparison, the charges on your credit card statements are much higher, vary significantly from month to month, and have high late fees justifying reasons to hold on to paper statements.

This low rate of eStatement adoption comes as no surprise to us at OfficeDrop. We at OfficeDrop have been studying paper accumulation habits among households and businesses for the last 10 months and have found that people still like to receive paper statements even if they have signed up eStatements. Some of the reasons they have cited are:

“We need it for our records.”

“We are afraid that we may not pay our bill and the paper statement acts as a reminder. Email reminders get lost in the hundreds of email messages I receive every day.”

“Our service provider only maintains eStatements for a year and they charge us a fee for statements older than that.”

To address these concerns and more, OfficeDrop lets you aggregate all your paper and digital documents in one place and access them from anywhere, anytime and for life. There is no need to worry about floods, backing up your computer periodically and paying fees to get access to your eStatements.

Are you still holding on to paper statements? If so, we would like to hear your reasons for sticking with paper. If on the other hand, if you are getting just eStatements, let us know how that is working for you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Document Management, eStatements, Market Research, Paperless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.