Located just 18 miles northeast of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, Hendersonville ranks as the fourth largest city within the Nashville metropolitan area. Known as the residence of numerous country music artists such as Johnny Cash, Kelly Clarkson, and Taylor Swift, Hendersonville is highly regarded for its diversity, family-friendly environment, and excellent public schools. The city takes pride in its vibrant communities, low unemployment rates, and favorable teacher-student ratios.
When their previous CIS vendor announced that the existing system would no longer be developed, they needed to identify a suitable vendor offering a customer-focused portal and a data-driven utility dashboard.
Hendersonville's primary objectives included: Providing multiple data points in a user-friendly, easily understandable format, accelerating the Start Service process for new customers, enhancing on-time payments while reducing customer service inquiries related to payments, billing, and usage, and optimizing staff time to maintain an appropriate workload for customer support personnel.
During the system transitions, Hendersonville had a fairly small customer service team and an upcoming retirement to consider. The Utility needed to either find a replacement for the employee or prepare for a vacant seat by finding ways to reallocate tasks and not add an additional employee.
MANUAL MOVE-IN AND MOVE-OUT PROCESS
Considering Hendersonville’s growing community, the Utility needed to ensure a smooth, quick move-in & move-out process. With the old system, move-in paperwork was completed in-person during normal business hours. Some new residents were frustrated by the time it took to start service. Spanning as much as 20 minutes per day per account with upwards of 20 new service requests during high seasons. The Utility was easily spending 6+ hours a day during busy seasons to complete in-person paperwork.
CUMBERSOME LEAK NOTIFICATIONS
As Hendersonville switched to radio readings, they wanted a way to inform customers of their use, potential leaks and bill abnormalities before a billing cycle ends. The data was available, but delivering that data created a tricky situation for the Utility's 60,000 residents. Before implementing their new system, the customer service staff spent several hours daily calling individual account owners to inform them of possible leaks. In turn, the Utility needed a way to deliver multiple data points to customers in a digestible, user-friendly format.
LACK OF DIGITAL SELF-SERVICE
Print communications often created a lag in bills and payments in Hendersonville. This increased overdue payments and created a new responsibility for the customer service team. Answering calls to complete payments, discussing high bill related issues with customers, and explaining usage reports became onerous.
MORE TIME FOR COMPLEX ISSUES
By creating an online and phone payment system that redirected payments, Hendersonville was able to reroute service calls and focus on more complex customer service issues.
40% of customers use the data analytics provided by VXsmart, reducing the burden on customer-facing staff and creating more customer autonomy.
ENGAGED AND EFFICIENT PROCESSES
VXsmart helped decrease cut offs since e-bills and notifications through VXsmart went from 15 a day to about 6 or 7 daily.
Enabling an online form for new residents to start service saved staff more than 30 hours a week during the busy seasons.
“We’ve been using the daily consumption data from VXsmart to notify customers and help prioritize and flag anything out of the ordinary for our internal team."
Marty Fellers, Information Technology Manager, Hendersonville Utility District
Hendersonville feels astonished by their recent accomplishments. Not only were they able to avoid replacing a staff member after retirement, but their online enrollment is so high, they are saving several hours a week through automation. This freed time created an opportunity to implement a new service that will further impact the way they do business.
The Utility plans to implement a kiosk in the foyer of their building. This will allow customers to make payments at their convenience. Specifically, since the Utility “doesn't swipe any cards, ever, customers will have another channel to make payments before and after hours and on holidays” says Office Manager, Christy Richardson.
Their advice is that "there will never be a perfect time to go live. Get familiar with the system and rip off the band aid. Push through each customer service situation on a case-by-case basis” in order to find solutions and move forward. With this mindset, Hendersonville was able to empower autonomy with customers and employees alike through VertexOne.
VertexOne’s re-named product portfolio echoes the company’s long-standing mission to enhance the customer experience. Therefore, products mentioned in this case study may not reflect our current portfolio names. Click the link to learn more about our product renaming and restructure.