A recent post on one of the listservs I subscribe to asked about how other utilities deal with customers who pay online using an echeck to defer disconnection on cut-off day. In this case, a customer would enter the echeck […]
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Payments
A few issues back I explored the pros and cons of charging convenience fees. In that blog post, I mentioned the all-too-common argument in support of charging convenience fees – “It’s not fair for all of our customers to have […]
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Two recent newsletters recapped the results of the 2022 Utility Staffing Survey. One question I’ve asked in each of the four Utility Staffing Surveys, but never analyzed, is what percentage of payments are received by each of the following methods: […]
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Before we get to today’s article, there are a couple of things to call to your attention where time is of the essence. Days of Exposure webinar I will be leading a series of four webinars for MuniBilling and the […]
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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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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 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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We’ve all heard it, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”. As familiar as this is, surprisingly, it isn’t actually the official motto of the US […]
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Each year for the past several years, fiserv has published a report of consumer payment trends. I find these to be interesting and informative and I’ve used them as the source for previous newsletters. Interestingly, the title of the most […]
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You’ve experienced this before, haven’t you? A customer calls, frustrated and angry, because they “paid online” and still were charged a late fee or, worse yet, disconnected for non-payment. Of course, by “paid online”, they don’t mean they paid using […]
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