Burlington Hydro gets a boost from billworx

Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to foster a relationship. Each opportunity offers a platform to communicate and engage. This insight led to the directworx team developing billworx – providing clients the ability to leverage bill statements and forms as a means to inform, promote, and engage. Burlington Hydro took advantage of billworx’ ability to turn a regular customer touchpoint into an eye-catching, reader-friendly, communication tool.

More informative. Easier to read.

Burlington Hydro was faced with a challenge that isn’t uncommon among many utility and telecom providers – a bland, difficult-to-navigate, uninspiring billing statement. An added wrinkle was Time-Of-Use billing – where electricity costs change based on the time of day – which meant more information being displayed on a bill statement. The ultimate result is frustration. A frustrated customer, for any business, is a big red flag. Not only does this lead to later or irregular bill payments, it can also tax your customer service team, and create a negative association with your brand.

These issues were addressed by billworx. The billworx team used their experience and expertise to revamp the layout of Burlington Hydro bills. Making the bills easier to read and easier to understand was a major first step toward a better customer experience. The team also took the mundane, two-colour statement and injected some colour and functional graphics into the layout. A smooth, simple use of red, yellow, and green to illustrate the time-of-use billing made a key aspect of the bill easy to understand. Easy-to-read graphs also gave customers more information about their electricity usage – elevating their overall experience when reviewing their bill.

Minimizing the need for costly inserts.

This refreshed format also utilized the statement to provide additional information to customers. Rather than using costly inserts to promote a new service or provide informative updates, the bill statement itself could now be used as a communication tool. Not only was this more efficient, it made these messages much more prominent – eliminating the potential for it to be set aside.

Managing customer segmentation for customized messaging.

Behind the scenes, billworx provides the strategic segmentation of customers. After a clean-up of Burlington Hydro’s customer database, they could now be segmented by their service category – business, residential, water-only, pre-authorized payment, etc. The benefit of this is that messages could now be tailored to a specific customer group; enhancing relevance and engagement.

“The directworx team is responsive, accommodating and effective. They assisted with the marketing aspect of our successful conversion to time of use pricing. We found their input to be valuable, providing seamless, automated integration with our systems to reduce work at our end. Further, the redesign project was completed on time and on budget, with no disruption of service.”

– Jennifer Smith, Vice President, Corporate Relations, Burlington Hydro Inc.

This is a great example of how a negative can be turned into a positive. Burlington Hydro took a frustrating customer experience and converted it into an opportunity to engage – providing a much better brand experience for their customers.