Headquartered in Newport, North Carolina, Carteret Craven Electric Company (CCEC) serves over 44,000 meters in the Carteret, Craven, Jones, and Onslow Counties. They are one of 26 not-for-profit electric cooperative utilities in North Carolina and more than 900 nationwide. The cooperative is part of Touchstone Energy, a nationwide family of co-ops exhibiting the core values of integrity, accountability, innovation, and commitment to the community. 

CCEC wanted to deliver on those values through its most frequent customer touchpoint: the billing and payment experience. However, the legacy payment solution CCEC was using relied heavily on manual processes and was largely an outdated, inefficient tool for both staff and customers. Not to mention that by hosting sensitive data on its own server, the co-op was burdened with a number of data security concerns. This left them extremely vulnerable, as cyber criminals know utility organizations generally have sensitive, private information on their servers, and that can be a gold mine for them. 

To deliver a secure, innovative billing and payment experience for both its community and its staff, CCEC knew it needed an electronic billing presentment and payment (EBPP) solution that was reliable and could alleviate staff workloads. 

Lack of a modern payment system increases workloads 

Hosting customer data on its own server caused CCEC’s collections experience to become a manual and cumbersome one, all while increasing the PCI compliance burden for the co-op’s internal IT team. These difficulties lead to high organizational costs, increased call volumes, and overall, below-average customer satisfaction. 

It was clear that the existing payment process was causing nothing but increased workloads and data security concerns – but it wasn’t as easy as implementing any payment solution that could just improve processes and customer ease of use. CCEC needed a payment platform that would increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and keep data safe without disrupting their existing core billing system (CIS), Milsoft Utility Solutions. 

Digital payments allow for a more streamlined process 

The CCEC team knew that offering a cutting-edge, cloud-based payment solution would relieve some internal pressure, reduce PCI risk, and modernize the customer experience – but they would need to find a payment solution that could accomplish all this while integrating with their Milsoft CIS. 

After searching for a solution that could check off all these critical boxes, CCEC found that InvoiceCloud was the perfect fit. From intuitive, self-service payment offerings to the airtight security of a PCI compliant SaaS platform, InvoiceCloud offered the co-op everything it needed to alleviate its stresses, including: 

• Offloading compliance liability 
• Consistent security patch updates 
• And a seamless integration with their current core billing system 

Excited to bring the co-op and its community into the future, CCEC eagerly kicked off its relationship with InvoiceCloud. 

Call volumes and mailed-in payments decrease with InvoiceCloud 

After implementing InvoiceCloud’s state-of-the-art EBPP, CCEC saw a number of benefits. Some immediate improvements seen were more productive staff, an increase in self-service adoption, and a reduced PCI scope due to offloading compliance liability to InvoiceCloud’s SaaS platform.

Other developments included: 

• Decreased payment-related call volumes, paper billing, and in-person payments by 40% 
• Enhanced customer satisfaction by keeping pace with member expectations 
• Significantly reduced print and mail costs 

To learn more about Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative and its success with InvoiceCloud, download the full case study below.