Erie Water Customer Story

Erie Water Works Successfully Moves from Click2Gov to AMS/Invoice Cloud Solutions for IVR, Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP), and Pay-by-Text

Erie Water Works provides drinking and fire hydrant water for the City of Erie, the fourth-largest city in the state of Pennsylvania. Today, millions of people visit Erie over the summer months for the wonderful State Parks and the popularly chosen attraction, Waldameer Park.

As a long-time NaviLine customer, Erie Water Works has been happy with their ERP solution provider, CentralSquare Technologies. As part of its plan to modernize, however, the Water Works felt that their current Click2Gov solution was not user friendly and did not have many of the AMS/Invoice Cloud features that they felt would greatly benefit their citizens.

The Water Works looked at a few competitors of AMS/Invoice Cloud’s EBPP but noted that the competitors’ cost was “astronomical”. In retrospect, Ron Loader (Senior Manager of Customer Service and Meters) and Rick Kerr (Manager of Information Technology Services) found that the AMS/Invoice Cloud solution was very helpful in “pushing customers to the electronic world”.

Kerr said, “Just the fact that the customer can pay with their telephone meant that it was going to be easier for customers to make payments”. According to him, “The Click2Gov interface was cumbersome and wasn’t as user friendly and also didn’t have the same power that is provided by the AMS/Invoice Cloud solution.”

With AMS/Invoice Cloud’s feature-robust system, Erie Water Works said, “the new Customer Portal System has allowed customers to gain more features including a mobile-friendly customer portal, email and/or text reminders, the option to schedule payments for a future date, and the ability to pay-by-text”. The Pay-by-Text feature is used personally by Kerr and he noted “It is an upgrade from Click2Gov and is working well”. The Erie Water Works customers have also transitioned well to using AMS/Invoice Cloud’s abundance of options, such as e-billing.

“Invoice Cloud had a couple of bells and whistles that Click2Gov did not. For instance, a person could go on Invoice Cloud and schedule a payment for a future date. With Click2Gov, we could not do that. That was a big item that we thought was nice for customers.” The number of customers sending in paper checks via a lockbox has decreased by 7% and this in turn has helped improve the efficiency of their staff.
The AMS/Invoice Cloud solution also has great reporting capabilities that the Erie Water Works staff has found to be of great value. Kerr said “We really like the reporting. You can do a lot of querying through Invoice Cloud. You set up a monthly report from the month before, and every month you get all the payment methods or whatever you need.”
Loader and Kerr said the reporting was easy and they have set up specific reports to be delivered automatically to appropriate individuals every month and this has helped ease the entire reconciliation process. Both Kerr and Loader specifically mentioned how pleased they were with their implementation team. They noted that their Project Manager was instrumental in making sure that the project ran smoothly. This included weekly meetings where the Implementation Team kept things on task, including the remote training that Erie Water Works said was a very positive experience for them and also helped to reduce the cost of the implementation.
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Per Erie, in general, “the electronic payment method brought in 47% of the total submitted to the bank account. The increase in Electronic Payments was 7%, and 13% of payments came in the front door of the Administration Building and paid Over-The-Counter. The overall increase in payments through the Erie Water Works Website was 6% from 2017 to 2018. Year 3 of the Erie Water Works Automated Phone Payment System showed a 7% increase in payments received over 2017. The Bank Draft - Auto-Pay system increased by 13% in 2018.”
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When Erie Water Works first started implementing the system, Loader said that “we had to learn the system, and then our customers had to learn the system.” As with any project, they had to iron out all the wrinkles as they went along, but within a short time they had everything running smoothly. Loader and Kerr said that the AMS/Invoice Cloud system is now on “cruise control”.
Erie Water Works stated that while being an early adopter did present some challenges, they would recommend the AMS/Invoice Cloud solution to any agency looking to provide their customers with more payment options while at the same time improving the efficiency of their staff. Their goal for 2019 is to increase the number of electronic payments by another 10% over 2018 and they believe the AMS/Invoice Cloud solution is fully capable of reaching that goal.