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For the past several months, I’ve been conducting the 2022 Utility Staffing Survey. This survey has become a biennial survey, alternating years with the Utility Fee Survey. The initial Utility Staffing Survey was in 2016, followed by 2018 and 2020. […]
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Last week, in one of the listservs I follow, the question was posed if other utilities charge a convenience fee for credit card payments. I find this question asked frequently when I speak at utility conferences. Two points of view […]
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In my recent interactions, I’ve been somewhat surprised at how many utilities are still printing their own bills in-house and haven’t moved to outsourcing. Without knowing exactly why they haven’t made the switch, I’ve come up with three possible reasons… […]
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During the last couple of conferences I’ve spoken at, I’ve been surprised by how many utilities are still taking phone credit card payments in the office. There are at least three downsides to taking phone credit card payments in person […]
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I’ve seen two related scenarios lately which merit discussing in more detail. The first case was a business review I recently completed for a utility that charges their cut-off fee as two separate charges – a cut-off fee, then a […]
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During the Q&A period after speaking at a conference last week, one of the attendees asked me what I thought about a final bill fee. First-time question That’s a question I’ve never been asked before, so I had to think […]
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I just completed a business review for a utility and calculated their Days of Exposure while I was on-site. If you’re not familiar with Days of Exposure, it’s the number of days of service a customer ends up owing for […]
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A couple of months ago I wrote about delivery delays the Postal Service recently implemented. Unfortunately, longer delivery times aren’t the only bad news coming from the Postal Service – they recently raised rates for the second time in a […]
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I’ve completed the migration of my website to my new domain. It still has the same useful content, but you’ll now find it at utilityinformationpipeline.com rather than utilityinformationpipeline.com. Not to worry – if you have links saved to my old […]
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I recently saw a social media post ranking NFL quarterbacks into tiers. This got me thinking about random hierarchies like the food pyramid and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which led to the idea of a hierarchy of payments. I’ve always […]
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