WM Utility seeing more on-time payments, reduced costs

WM Utility seeing more on-time payments, reduced costs

Online bill- pay a hit with customers

news@theeveningtimes.com

The West Memphis utilities department took strides to improve customer service and reduce operating costs during 2017. The utilities commission heard the good report from business Office Manager Rob Hollon. The most popular customer service move was the new fee free online bill payment. According to Hollon, customers have flocked to Internet payments.

“2017 was the first full year we had online payments and in May we terminated the phone payments,” said Hollon.

“Those who had been paying by phone have migrated to paying on the web or through a cashier. Twothirds of our customers are paying us on the web, and a third through the cashier’s window.”

Not having to staff the phones to receive payments, the department reduced in size by one position through attrition, and the wages and benefits expenses saved went to the bottom line. Not receiving payment calls has improved opportunities for answering billing inquiries.

“The staff is more able to answer incoming phones calls than take phone payments,” said Hollon.

Overdue bills aren’t as big as they used to be because of changes in billing and payment policies. 2017 showed a jump in cutoffs for non-payment but the a total amount owed by delinquent customers was down.

“We increased our cutoffs by nine percent,” said Hollon. “Our mass cutoffs dropped from eight days to three days, largely due to the weather.”

Mass cutoffs days are expensive as often employees from other departments are assigned to work on shutting off customers.

Cutoffs can’t be done when summer temperatures are too high or winter weather becomes too cold. The utilities cutoff policy has a heart.

“In 2016 we had 46 days we could not shutoff due to our weather policy,” said Hollon. “In 2017 we had only 23 days we could not cutoff, so were more able to do our daily cutoffs and keep up. Mass cutoffs usually result in personnel being redirected from other departments and overtime.

That was a cost savings we had.”

As a result, those that abandoned their old bills and came back seeking new service were more able to pay the past due and reconnect last year. The business office had tracked the improvement.”

“In 2016 we starting looking at our collection of final bill abandonment, and then those coming in again seeking new service,” said Hollon. “In 2016 we collected on 354 of those accounts, $137,000, which averages out to $367. In 2017 we collected on about the same number of accounts but had a 60 percent decrease on the amount collected. Its because we have filtered through all those high dollar past accounts. No one owes us $500 anymore; they owe us $200.”

By John Rech