The City of Bethel Finance Department fields a high volume of calls daily, many of which are from customers who want to pay their bills over the phone. The department is leaning to propose implementing a fee for taking over-the-phone utility payments from non-senior citizens, according to the Finance Department’s report to city council, June 13th, 2023.
The department has been nudging its customers to use Xpress Bill Pay – the online bill paying system that the City has implemented.
“Answering the phone is a necessary duty, but for every phone call answered to take a payment, there is another potentially urgent call being missed, or an in-person customer being neglected,” wrote Finance Director Xavier Mason in his report to council.
“There are several reasons that we believe adopting this change would benefit both our customers and the Finance Department,” said Mason.
One, a reduction in the volume of calls would increase customer service.
“Due to the high call volume, customers often complain they can’t get ahold of us despite our best efforts to answer the phones. When we miss their calls, we try to call them back but often they don’t answer or are extremely rude about us not answering their calls the first time. This is frustrating and demoralizing for both the staff and the customers,” Mason said.
Two, over-the-phone payments are frequent distractions that negatively impact workflow and productivity.
“We have only so many hours in a workday to complete critical tasks in our sub-departments and our time would be better served helping customers over the phone with matters they can’t handle themselves or giving our inperson customers our full attention.”
Three, informing customers about Xpress Bill Pay without an incentive for them to switch hasn’t altered their behavior.
“We have already tried to persuade customers to pay their bills online without much success. After taking their payments over the phone, we have been informing them about the option to use the Xpress BillPay website instead, but we are often laughed at or mocked for our efforts. The general response has been why would they go through the trouble of signing up and logging into a website when they can just call us instead. There is little incentive currently for customers to sign up for Xpress Bill Pay and every phone call we get takes away our focus and time for more critical tasks.”
Four, customers calling us in large volumes to make their payments is not a good use of the City’s money or resources.
“For example, we are paying for Xpress Bill Pay services which are currently being underutilized by customers. Also, the time, energy, and focus of our staff are finite and would be better used by the City to help with tasks more complicated than clicking a few buttons on a website for the customer. The money generated by this fee would help offset the financial loss of having our staff take these kinds of simple payments over the phone.”
The Finance Department is proposing that a fee be considered by the Finance Committee and ultimately the City Council for taking over-the-phone utility payments from non-senior citizens.
“We believe the fee would need to be at least $10 to persuade those able to access the internet to pay their bills themselves though considering the cost of living in Bethel, perhaps $20 would be more appropriate,” Mason concluded.
