Why Is Paying Bills So Difficult?

I thought it was common knowledge - People are more likely to pay you if you make it easier for them. 

Examples of what not to do:

1) NYSDMV

I know some of you are sick of hearing about this, and some of you can't believe I paid them, but it's still a good example. I got a ticket at 1:00am on a Thursday. October 23, 2008, to be exact. I was ticked off, so I decided to pay the ticket off right away and get it out of my mind. First thing that morning I signed onto the website, entered in my ticket info, only to find that it was not listed yet. Ok, this made sense, as it had not even been 8 hours since I'd received the ticket, and most of the hours had been in the middle of the night. You have 14 days to pay a ticket, and by the 10th day, my ticket was still not available online. There was no phone number to call. Being the conscientious person I am, I wrote a check and put it in the mail, along with a letter saying that it was unacceptable to offer an online payment option, and then have it not work. My guess is that people without OCD and photographic memories might have forgotten and not paid the ticket at all, and then got slammed with a late fee.

2) Frontier Communications 

I realize many of you are also tired of my whining about Frontier, but this is another good example. I had a phone/DSL bill to pay, and was using a credit card to pay. I called, went through 5 billion (or, three) automated menus, and arrived at the automated credit card payment system. The first direction: Enter your account number as it appears on the top of you bill. Ok, this is easy - but as I'm entering the number I have the feeling this is just not going to work (yeah, yeah, I knooooow). It doesn't work. The nice computer voice lady tells me she doesn't recognize my number. I try it again. She still doesn't recognize it. I try it a third time and she still doesn't recognize it and hangs up on me. I call Frontier, but this time navigate through the automated menus to find Customer Service, and ask the lady why the heck my account number is unrecognizable. This lady, who is a human, tries to sell me extra services, and then tells me she is connecting me to the appropriate extension so I can pay. Well, what do you know, same friendly computer lady asks me to enter my account number. And, what do you know, she doesn't recognize it again. So I hang up on the computer lady, call a third time, get to a human for the second time, and tell her I am trying to pay the bill but it is just not working. She connects me to another human, who takes the credit card info, and I pay the bill.

The business I work for used to have a terrible payment system. The only option was to pay monthly, by check. This did not work. In the 11 months that I used this system, we racked up about $2,000 in unpaid invoices. When I had the opportunity to change things I did - options! I offered three methods to pay your bill, two payment schedules, the option for automated payments, and an incentive if you pay your entire bill up front. I've been using this system for four months and currently have $41 of unpaid invoices. 

I know the convention is to slam people with late payments to get them to pay their bills on time, but I think the key to getting a payment is to simply have actually making the payment possible.