The utility industry is getting transformed. Large utilities are adopting various digital solutions and innovations like smart meters at a rapid pace to deliver a seamless experience to their customers. While larger utilities have budgets and large customer base that allow them to innovate faster, municipal utilities (also known as public utilities) struggle to roll out digital solutions, implement omnichannel customer service platforms or implement smart meter rollouts – it could be because of various reasons such as budget constraints, regulatory compliances, and tighter control by municipal areas.
Can an easily implementable next-gen digital solution help in addressing them? Let’s check out!
Unique Challenges of Municipal Utilities
Let’s understand the common reasons why municipal utilities struggle to deliver on the expectations of the modern customers –
- Aging Infrastructure: Municipal utilities often have aging infrastructure which does not deliver the capabilities needed to operate in today’s hyper-connected world. Such proprietary infrastructure compels them to make continuous changes in business processes and operations to satisfy regulatory and technological requirements – which is relatively easier for large players.
- High Costs: The continuous pressure municipal utilities are under to reduce costs needed to serve and improve customer service also makes day-to-day operations extremely challenging. Although there is a pressing need to make utilities more affordable and reliable for customers, the lack of modern tools makes it impossible to meet these requirements – without compromising on either cost or quality.
- Continuous business disruption and frequent regulatory changes: Despite all the efforts municipal utilitiesput towards making their billing, customer service and metering processes efficient, extended business disruptions and regulatory changes cause operational interruptions. This leads to several billing issues and an increase in customer complaints and possibly regulatory investigations as well.
- Security: Municipal utilities also find it difficult to have the required security mechanisms in place due to a poor understanding of the need for strong security controls or a poor budget. Safeguarding against threats, vulnerabilities, and potential emergencies then becomes a challenge for most, putting business and customer data at risk.
- Sustainability: While serving the community, municipal utilities also have to demonstrate their commitment towards renewable energy. To reduce their carbon footprint, they need to change very design of the business and optimize operations. However, it is hard for them to achieve that because of the tight budgets they operate with.
How a modern cloud-based metering & billing solution can help
Looking at the challenges listed above, that municipal utilities face, embracing a pre-configured cloud-based digital customer–meter–billing solution is a great way to modernize the billing infrastructure. With templates for Water, Electricity, Gas, and Waste Management Utilities, such a solution can help meet most of the requirements of municipal utilities while mitigating most of the security threats.
An end-to-end, digitally advanced, and integrated solution coupled with accelerators built for utilities that make the implementation faster, reliable, and cost-effective. With several CIS and MDM capabilities, such a solution empowers municipal utilities with cutting-edge technologies to make them agile and brings down overall TCO via a pay-as-you-go model.
Here’s looking at some of the top features of a next-generation solution like RIA Transformation Cloud for Utilities can enable municipal utilities to eliminate manual work, overcome inefficiencies, reduce operational costs, and simplify the meter to cash process:
- Self-service: A modern billing solution offers advanced Self-Service capabilities, empowering customers with a secure, flexible, and personalized portal which provides an easy and convenient way of getting answers to a variety of questions and concerns that they may have. Using this application, customers can easily view bills, make payments, request services, and even resolve issues on their own. Self-service allows account information to be easily pulled from CIS in real-time, providing customers the flexibility to access information 24×7. The biggest benefit is the reduction of the load on the customer call center for simple issues which get sorted out due to the portal.
- Integrated hub: A new-age meter billing solution offers an Integration Hub that assists in migrating data from legacy metering platforms into new CIS during implementation. Using this hub, municipal utilities can easily convert data from legacy sources into new CIS using an automated and robust data governance approach. The in-built, comprehensive data management framework ensures integrity, quality, and confidentiality of data throughout the migration/integration process.
- Document fulfillment: A cloud-based Digital CIS solution also delivers a Document Fulfilment Tool: an advanced platform for the design and deployment of invoices, statements, letters, documents, and correspondence from CIS. Whether these invoices are digital or conventional, in batch or on-demand, municipal utilities can send generated documents directly via email, https, or an API/web service. They can also be stored for future retrieval.
As a business and technology advisory specializing in the Utilities, Technology, and Financial Services industries, RIA Advisory is focused on delivering unmatched meter and billing services to municipal (and large) utilities. Our team of highly qualified and experienced Utilities Business and Technology specialists is proficient in the complete range of the Utilities Applications Suite of Products and dedicated to providing the best solution to each client. Whether you are looking for implementing a metering solution, need application management and support, require testing services, or want to optimize your existing business processes, we deliver the services you need to reduce operational costs, improve billing accuracy, boost customer experience index, and enable next-generation Meter-to-cash innovation.
