How One NDS Utility Improved Customer Service with InvoiceCloud

Maine Water Company was stuck in a frustrating situation – their legacy online bill payment system was not meeting their needs.  Maine Water customers as well as Maine Water staff felt that the current system was not user friendly and was down often, which created a poor customer service experience and, more importantly, low customer adoption.

Maine Water turned to Northern Data Systems (NDS), their utility billing and CIS solutions provider for assistance with the transition to InvoiceCloud (IC), one of NDS’ fully integrated partners that is a SaaS provider of electronic bill presentment and payment solutions (EBPP).  Ultimately, Maine Water’s decision to choose IC was based on three factors.  First, was IC’s easy-to-navigate end-user interface.  Second, IC offered several different types of payment channels for their customers.   And third, IC offered innovative ways to assist and promote customer adoption of the service. 

The process of transitioning to the new EBPP was a bit challenging at first, but with some preplanning and coordination, the system was up running.  Maine Water couldn’t be happier with the outcome.  “Our customers tell us that they prefer the IC user experience,” Pam Blackman, Revenue Services Manager stated.  “And more importantly, we have increased adoption of over 350 accounts per month for a total of 6,322 new electronic bill customers since we went live,” she added.  Maine Water now has approximately 21,000 customers using the IC online service.

One of the payment channels that Maine Water has been really happy with is InvoiceCloud’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) channel.  “We have had 6,310 customers use the IVR since we implemented it, with 774 of those during off hours.  These are all calls that would have been taken in our call center,” commented Blackman.  The addition of this service provides an important benefit to Maine Water by improving the overall customer service experience.