One of the most common challenges currently faced by water utility companies is the issue of rising water rates. In many areas throughout the United States, water utilities are dealing with aging water infrastructures and increasing treatment costs. This creates both collections and revenue issues for the utility, as increasing water rates usually result in delayed payments and, in some cases, customers who are unable to pay their bills at all. Since water utilities are responsible for the costs associated with maintaining and treating water regardless of the revenue they collect, these collection issues lead to disruption in business services and higher bills across the broader customer base. One way that utilities can effectively manage these challenges is by utilizing an online payment platform that engages customers and drives higher self-service rates.

One of Invoice Cloud’s clients, Arlington Water Utilities, was faced with the challenge of balancing rising operational costs and increasing rates with keeping water affordable for its customers. Here’s how improving self-service adoption rates enabled this utility to overcome these challenges to achieve important business goals.

The challenge of rising costs

Like many water utility companies across the U.S., Arlington Water Utilities, located in Texas, was faced with the issue of steadily rising operational costs. To avoid raising rates for its customers, Arlington needed a way to increase revenue and decrease costs substantially to meet revenue goals and achieve business initiatives. The organization was facing several cost challenges, including:

• High credit card processing fees
• Lack of self-service functionality that increased call volume and in-person visits
• High costs associated with printing and mailing paper bills

Improving self-service to increase revenue and decrease costs

Arlington needed an Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) platform that could help them overcome current collections issues to decrease costs and help them maintain stable water rates. Invoice Cloud helps clients achieve these types of goals by providing an online payment platform that consistently engages customers, prompting them to enroll in services like auto pay and paperless billing. Improving self-service rates has a number of positive benefits for your organization, including:

• Reducing the time it takes your organization to collect payments
• Decreasing costs associated with printing and mailing bills
• Freeing up staff time to focus on other high priority work

The Invoice Cloud platform engages customers at every point throughout the payment process, which is why our platform achieves industry-leading self-service adoption rates. For Arlington, this increased self-service translated to several benefits, including:

• Higher customer satisfaction rates due to an enhanced user experience and simplified payment process
• Significant cost savings from reduced printing and mailing of paper bills due to higher paperless enrollment
• Improved efficiencies that enabled staff to shift focus to higher priority projects
• Better customer engagement

By partnering with Invoice Cloud, Arlington was able to decrease costs enough to stabilize water rates for its customers while still improving its staff and collections efficiencies.

How to improve self-service at your organization

Arlington Water Utilities is just one example of how a well-designed online payment platform drives positive benefits for an organization through customer engagement and improved self-service adoption rates. To read the full results of Arlington’s implementation, download the case study below:

To learn more about how Invoice Cloud can help your organization improve self-service rates to increase revenue and decrease costs, schedule a demo today.