Industry: Utility
Using the payment experience to drive customer affordability
How one utility took control of its payment experience with DirectBiller and saved customers millions.
Annual customer savings
Payments processed per month
Transaction growth over 5 years
The Challenge
Multiple vendors. Zero control. Higher costs all around.
A major natural gas utility serving two million customers across three states had a payment infrastructure problem hiding in plain sight. They weren’t using one payment platform. They were using several, each handling a different payment method, each pointing customers somewhere different.
Pay by ACH? One site. Pay by credit card? Another. Fall behind and need to pay fast? Start over. Enter your information again. Hope it works.
The utility had no control over the experience their customers were having. No control over the fees their customers were paying. And every month, their reconciliation team tried stitching together a complete picture from systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
- One vendor handling bill presentment and payment
- Another vendor handling convenience fees
- Manual reconciliation across disconnected systems
- Slow settlements from multiple payment processors
- PCI vulnerability from un-tokenized payment data
- Unnecessarily high costs passed on to residential customers
The solution
A unified, flexible experience for two million customers
The utility replaced its entire payment stack with DirectBiller. Immediately, they had the built-in flexibility to reduce fees for residential customers while managing commercial rates independently.
Customers now have a single, intuitive experience across every channel. Web, mobile, CSR, and IVR. The IVR speaks to them in their own language and remembers how they paid last time.
Speed and safeguards behind the scenes
The era of multi-system reconciliation nightmares was over. Now there is a single daily file and next day settlement.
Meanwhile, over one million customer accounts were tokenized at onboarding. Improving PCI protection by removing payment data from the utility’s systems on day one.
What consolidation looks like across a two-million-customer utility
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One experience across channels
Web, mobile, CSR, and IVR
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IVR in multiple languages
Following the same flow as every other channel
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Fees managed independently
For residential and commercial customers
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Single daily reconciliation file
With automatic ERP posting
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Over one million accounts tokenized
At onboarding
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Next-day settlement
The results
Making payments more intuitive and more affordable drove measurable adoption
The utility turned a fragmented, vendor-dependent payment stack into a controlled, consolidated platform. Two million customers gained a single payment experience. Their AR team gained a single reconciliation file. And the fees their customers had been paying for years came down.
Immediate impact
$3.5M in customer savings with reduced fees
1M+ payments processed per month
27% transaction growth over 5 years
“Most utilities treat payments as a back-office problem. This one saw it as a connective thread. They addressed affordability, experience, and operations in a single move.”
— Nirmal Kumar, CPO, Aliaswire
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