Turn Utility Billing Customer Experiences into Satisfied Customers

Electricity makes our lives easier and more comfortable. We use it every day, and we don’t even notice it--until it goes out. Water is the same. You need water to fill your sink, run your washer, or even water your lawn. But what happens to your customers when they don’t have electricity or water? They often contact you, frequently upset that their comfort has been disrupted, and expect you to restore services immediately.

Disruption of water or electricity service does not have to be a challenge to you and your team--if you have customer information and utility billing engine in place. When you have your CIS, outage management, EBPP, and a self-service web portal integrated and working for you, you can turn utility billing customer experiences into satisfied customers, even the challenging ones.

Reactive Response

It used to be that when a customer’s service was disrupted, your phones would light up, and your team went into action. This on-demand customer service was the norm, and your customers knew their power was restored, or their water was running again when they flipped a switch or turned the tap. Like most utilities, you reacted to the challenge and worked diligently to restore services.

Proactive Response

When you work reactively, you are still providing for your community, but you risk upsetting your customers if you don’t restore service when they feel you should. Because of social media, now you expose your utility to a backlash of negative publicity, which can take months for you to repair your reputation.

Today, customers expect proactive service similar to what companies like Amazon, Best Buy, and Uber can provide. They want to interact with a vendor online and get a notification (either by text, email, or online) that the order was started and ultimately that the order was delivered. If they don’t get the service they expect, your phones still light up, but you have the added headache of a possible social media storm.

As a utility provider, you’re thinking we’ve always dealt with outages as they happened. And we can’t possibly provide that proactive level of service. But you can, if you have the right engine running your utility.

Customer Information System and Utility Billing

The engine that drives proactive customer experiences is a CIS system like NorthStar. When you have an Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Outage Management (OMS), Electronic Bill Pay and Presentment provider (EBPP), and Self-Serve Portal like SilverBlaze in place, you and your team have the tools they need to deliver exceptional utility billing customer experiences. 

NorthStar CIS is the brain of this technology. It integrates with each software and stores your customer information in one location. Outages, notifications, online interactions, and payment information are all routed back to NorthStar so that your customer service representatives (CSRs) have everything they need at their fingertips.

Outage Management

When an outage management system (OMS) is integrated with NorthStar CIS, your customer experience engine can keep your community proactively informed. An outage management system pulls outage information from customers, CSRs, AMI, and SCADA and provides this information to the dispatcher. With this information in hand, the dispatcher sends field crews to take care of planned or unplanned outages. Outage management will help dispatchers deploy your field service technicians and notify your staff and customers that you are aware of the outage and working to fix the problem, often before your customers have a chance to pick up the phone.

With an outage management system, you can even illicit your community’s aid in proactively managing your equipment by having them report outages, street lights that are out, and any other events that keep you from providing services to your community.

EBPP

Another part of your engine in a proactive environment is the EBPP provider you use. You want someone who can bring solutions to your customers from a trusted platform that allows customers to use their preferred payment method. And you can use your EBPP to drive more online payment adoption and proactive notifications and give your customers more of what they have come to expect in dealing with a service provider.

Your customers may only interact with your website once a month but routinely interact online with applications like Alexa, Amazon Pay, and PayPal. With so many payment options, your EBPP must provide secure, PCI-compliant choices when and where your customers live online. If you don’t give them options, you risk your customers spending their money on goods and services other than their utility bills.

Your EBPP provider has many ways to remind customers to pay their bills. You can send text notifications, use a chatbot, send reminders to Google wallet or Apple wallet, and even email reminders to ensure that utility bills get paid. When you meet your customers where they are online, you make it convenient for them to pay their bills, turning that customer experience into a convenient and positive one.

SilverBlaze

The last part of your customer experience engine is a self-serve portal. A web engagement tool allows your customers to interact with your utility when and where it’s convenient for them. They don’t have to wait in line because SilverBlaze puts them first in line every time. With SilverBlaze, customers can quickly pay their bills and initiate move-ins, move-outs, and service transfers. When a customer is disconnected and pays a bill, their payment information is sent to NorthStar in real-time so that everyone is informed and services are restored quickly.

Moreover, SilverBlaze allows customers to manage their consumption, search for transactions, and archive bills. And AMI and MDM customers can pull real-time data to review usage, temperature, humidity, and precipitation to show how the weather affects their consumption. SilverBlaze shows customers their consumption in dollar amounts, so they know exactly how much their spending and not just the KWh they’re consuming.

When you have the right customer experience engine in place, you can give your community the positive experience they want when and where they want them.  

Are you looking for an engine that will turn utility billing customer experiences into satisfied customers? Contact our sales team to see how NorthStar and the Harris ecosystem of products can help you satisfy your customers.