How Snohomish County PUD Turned a Customer Portal Into a District-Wide Resource

THE CHALLENGE

A bill-pay tool with no way to show customers why

Before 2020, Snohomish County PUD's customers had one real option online: pay a bill. The system behind it offered basic bill presentment and a handful of small usage charts but no real way for customers to understand their own consumption or connect a high bill to what actually drove it.

That created a trust gap. When a customer called questioning a bill, the PUD's best answer was to ask them to trust it. Comparing a current bill to the same month a year earlier meant digging up old statements, since almost no one keeps 12 months of bills on hand.

At the same time, the PUD was heading into a new phase: rolling out advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) across the district, which meant far more usage data than the utility had ever had access to before. PUD leadership wanted one central place, for customers and eventually staff across departments, to make use of it.

THE SOLUTION

One customer engagement portal, built to grow with the district

The PUD began work on VertexOne's customer engagement portal in late 2018 and went live in the fourth quarter of 2020. From the start, the goal was broader than bill pay: a single customer engagement portal where customers could find what they needed without hunting across the PUD's website, on a foundation that could grow alongside its AMI rollout.

That foundation is well used today. With VertexOne’s customer engagement portal, customers can view interval-level usage data, manage payments, and request routine changes without a phone call. Customers also reach the portal through its mobile app, checking usage and managing their account without needing a desktop. About 2,400 of the portal's average daily interactions now come through the app.

Commercial customers use VertexOne’s customer portal to pull invoices, view whole-building usage data for Clean Buildings Act compliance and connect to programs like ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. Strategic energy partners pull interval data through Green Button Connect allowing them to use their information with energy-management tools, home automation platforms, solar and battery analysis services, and other approved applications.

Adoption has grown almost entirely on its own, without a major marketing push. Much of it tracks the PUD's AMI rollout: as new meters go in, customers are pointed straight to their own data, and customer service reps use that same data to walk high-bill callers through a weekly usage graph next to a weather comparison, instead of just a single year-over-year number.

THE RESULTS

Past 80% for business, and still climbing

"This isn’t just bill payment and presentment anymore. Our engineers use it; our water department uses it. People use this for their jobs, not just as a customer-facing tool. It’s become a pretty important resource for us."

-Cori Mitchell, Program Director, Snohomish County PUD

• A tool the whole PUD relies on. Beyond customer service, the PUD's engineering team uses portal data for rate-schedule and load-constraint analysis, metering staff bring it into the field, and the water department uses it internally for leak detection.
• Past the goal for business, closing in for residential. The PUD's digital adoption has grown to 80.7% among business customers, already past its 80% target, and to 77.4% among residential customers, up from 74.1% and 71.4% respectively in 2025.
• Fewer calls for routine tasks. Early questions about how to navigate the portal tapered off quickly after launch. On an average day, the portal handles nearly 10,000, compared with about 770 calls into the call center. Today's call volume centers on requests that require a customer service representative.
• Conversations backed by data. Instead of asking customers to simply trust a billing explanation, CSRs can now show them the same usage charts and weather comparisons the PUD sees, turning “trust us” into data a customer can use to understand their bill.
• A resource for every kind of customer. From residential customers managing autopay to property managers pulling invoices across a portfolio of buildings to solar customers tracking net metering, the portal flexes to the customer in front of it.
• Real momentum on electronic payments. 89.4% of payments are now made electronically, roughly 339,000 payments a month, up from 87.1% in early 2025.

LOOKING AHEAD

The PUD's next chapter centers on turning its nearly complete AMI rollout into new, event-driven engagement. The PUD is preparing to reach out to customers around specific usage events, using their own data to show them practical ways to save energy and lower their bills. It’s an early look at the kind of interval-data-driven engagement the PUD has been building toward.

As the PUD finishes its AMI deployment, it expects the portal's role, for customers and for its own staff, to keep growing right along with it.

Ready to turn your portal into a district-wide resource? See how VertexOne's customer portal grows with your AMI rollout.