Our local municipally-controlled electric utility has its problems.
This past summer, the Commercial Appeal reported that MLGW placed a powerful local politician who didn't pay his utility bills into a program that doesn't disconnect low-income customers for nonpayment; the result was the politician ringing up a delinquent utility bill of over $16,000. Reports further indicated that the politically appointed President of MLGW authorized or at least condoned this abuse. This may seem strange to those of you in other places, but it's pretty common for Memphis (you don't think we're nicknamed "Bluff City" just for the riverside bluffs, do you?).
Recently, MLGW added a new online feature called My Account that allows customers to get their bills online and analyze their energy expenditures more thoroughly. That seemed cool, so I signed up. I entered lots of information on my home (problematic since the system kept insisting that I have a swimming pool -- I looked and I don't), and now I get lots of pretty energy graphs and helpful suggestions like "add more insulation". OK, so maybe it's not that useful.
Well, it paid off last week while I was flying to Seattle. I received an e-mail from MLGW's My Account service letting me know that my utility bill was overdue and that I was being charged a late fee. Of course, it would have been nicer if it had alerted me to this fact before the bill was due so I wouldn't owe a late fee, but that's clearly beyond the system's capabilities.
But, wait a minute. I had already sent a check to pay that bill. I checked my bank and the check had already cleared well before the bill's due date. Something was amiss. I called MLGW, and after negotiating their cryptic phone tree finally got a representative. They told me that MLGW had received my payment on time and I owed no late fees. He had no idea why I received the e-mail. I'm not sure he was even aware of the My Account system. Today, when I check the My Account system, it shows I paid my last bill on time. Apparently it changed its mind.
Maybe the company's new slogan should be: MLGW, putting the "ECH!" in "tECHnology". I'm actually looking forward to being a Seattle City Light customer again.
Friday, December 07, 2007
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1 comments:
Hi Bruce,
As with any new technology, we sometimes experience "growing pains" and your experience highlights some of that. After seeing your post, we did some research to see what happened. Here's what we found out.
1. When customers enroll in My Account, they select whether they wish to receive payment reminder and late payment notification emails 1-10 days prior to due date. (You can modify your selections through the My User Profile.)
2. If you are enrolled in optional eBilling, and are making the payment electronically from a bank account, the system will scan its payment transactions to determine if an electronic payment has been made for that account. If any electronic payment (including partial) is found, it does not send an email. If an electronic payment is not found, it sends the requested email at the appointed day. HOWEVER, the system does not/cannot scan for payments outside of the eBilling electronic environment, so payments received through other channels are not "seen" by EBPP and the email is sent. We have now added a paragraph to the email to reflect this distinction.
3. The My Account dashboard shows the Account Balance and Last Payment in the Account Summary section. (top box, left column.) It is updated nightly.
4. We may add more descriptive text to the EBPP pages that contain the reminder email selection boxes, to clarify the payment scan process on the front end. There is a FAQ, but we might need to add more.
5. As for the swimming pool part, we did have a programming bug that "added" (checked box) swimming pool as a default for some customers. It was fixed shortly after. You would need to "remove" (uncheck) the swimming pool box to see actual bill analysis details.
This is probably far more info than you wanted or needed, but I wanted to make sure that we got back to you on your concerns. I see that you are moving soon, so it may not be an issue, but please feel free to contact us in the future if you have any questions or concerns.
Glen Thomas,
MLGW Supervisor of Communications & PR
gthomas@mlgw.org
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