As the local distribution company for the Town of Orangeville and Grand Valley, Orangeville Hydro bills for its own electricity services, as well as water/wastewater services on behalf of the Town of Orangeville.
While the billing arrangement provides significant cost savings through the consolidation of bill printing, mailing and processing, the challenge for the municipality was the lack of data visibility in order to respond to customer inquiries. Each time the municipality received a customer billing inquiry, they would have to contact Orangeville Hydro to investigate or refer the customer to contact Orangeville Hydro directly. Consequently, the lack of data visibility resulted in a customer service bottleneck and growing frustration amongst customers.
Orangeville Hydro could not simply give the Town of Orangeville access to its customer information system (CIS) as this would be a breach of privacy under the Canadian privacy laws. Furthermore, the Town of Orangeville only needed access to view water/wastewater data for their customer accounts, not electric information.
To help Orangeville Hydro and the Town of Orangeville overcome this challenge, ERTH Corporation developed a custom portal through which designated municipal employees have visibility of water/wastewater account and billing information only. Electric account and billing information remains private, secure and only accessible to designated Orangeville Hydro staff.
As a result of this custom development project, the Town of Orangeville is now able to investigate and respond to most customer inquiries for water/wastewater billing, reducing the burden on Orangeville Hydro’s customer service team. Most importantly, the customer experience has improved greatly.
“Through this development project, ERTH was able to deliver exactly what we needed to meet the data requirements of the Town of Orangeville, while protecting the privacy and security of our electric account data,” explained Rob Koekkoek, President at Orangeville Hydro. It has been a win-win for Orangeville Hydro, the Town of Orangeville and their customers.”