The Opportunity
City of Lexington, NC – known as the Barbecue Capital of the World – serves the utility needs of 22,000 customers. Lexington faced several challenges in its mission to give customers a best-in-class billing and payment experience: its payment options were limited and with more than half of its bills being sent by mail, the rising cost of postage was severely impacting Lexington’s bottom line.
To address these challenges and offload payment processing burdens experienced by its internal team, the City opted to move from its legacy vendor and implement the Paymentus billing and payment solution.
The Solution
Paymentus eased the migration process through dedicated support and its complimentary marketing team. This was essential as all AutoPay enrollees would need to re-enroll within the Paymentus solution. In particular, the disruption of AutoPay invited risks to a highly valued sub-section of customers whose monthly payments could always be counted on to be paid on time.
While the implementation was a success, the City needed to spur digital enrollment to ensure customers could maintain their service and manage their accounts through their preferred manner. To do this, Lexington partnered with the Paymentus Client Adoption Success Team (CAST), a complimentary offering that delivers strategic marketing campaigns for Paymentus clients.
Working together, City of Lexington and CAST created a multi-channel incentive campaign (sweepstakes) aimed at driving AutoPay and paperless eBill enrollment. The campaign awarded two $500 Visa gift cards (provided by Paymentus) to customers who enrolled in both AutoPay and paperless eBills during a specified three-month window. To drive participation, CAST created in-office posters, social media posts, bill inserts and more, with the Lexington team also promoting the sweepstakes to walk-in and call-in customers. CAST provided ongoing strategic support, as well as the campaign assets, all at no cost to Lexington.
The Results
The combined efforts yielded impressive results. Following the campaign, City of Lexington achieved a 59% increase in AutoPay adoption (scheduled payments). Lexington also reached a new scheduled payment monthly average high, which came in at 91% higher than their pre-campaign monthly average.
Prior to the campaign, the AutoPay channel was used 17.6% of the time versus Lexington’s one-time web and phone payment channels. Post campaign, AutoPay usage grew to 24.6%, making it one of the most popular payment channels for the City.
Topping it off, the three-month campaign period produced more combined scheduled payments than the previous seven months combined.
Greater on-time payments through AutoPay was far from the only benefit City of Lexington has experienced. The utility estimates that due to paperless eBill adoption, its annual savings on postage, mailing and bill generation is currently set to exceed $33K per year (and growing).
City of Lexington also reports improved performance thanks to Agent Dashboard reporting, which simplifies the process of reconciling all accounts over the City’s three different monthly billing cycles. A decrease in call volumes and in-person payments have further enabled Lexington’s customer service representatives to focus greater time and energy on addressing more complex customer needs.
