Municipal utilities and many electric cooperatives provide multiple services: electricity, broadband, water, gas and more. They provide their customers with two, three, or four services. In such cases, a Customer Information System (CIS) that can handle all those services is preferable. But what does that mean?
Multi-Service Billing
As an example, let’s look at an electric utility that also offers broadband service.
Stand Alone Systems
In a typical scenario there is a legacy CIS for the electric service; electric billing stays in that system and a second billing system is added for broadband.
This approach may appear clean. The electric billing team does not have to learn a new system. However, when a customer calls with a question about their bill, your customer service representative is looking at two different screens, two different account histories, and two different balance totals. When the same customer wants to set up autopay, the process may be different for each service. When collections become necessary, the two systems may not know about each other. It a utility was already offering multiple services before adding broadband the challenge is compounded.
And while some CIS providers claim support for multiple services, they simply create separate accounts for each customer: one for each service. Unfortunately, more accounts mean more work for your staff.
Native Multi-Service Architecture
A true multi-service CIS is built from the database up and provides a single customer account with multiple services: all services are tied to one customer identity, and all services can be billed on the same schedule.
What True Multi-Service Billing Requires
Before evaluating any CIS for multi-service capability, it helps to look at what the billing engine needs to handle. The requirements fall into several categories.
A Single Customer Record Across All Services
The foundation of multi-service billing is a unified customer record. This means one account number, one address history, one contact preference, and one credit and payment history that spans all services. Logical right? But most legacy systems were not built that way. Systems built around service types rather than the customer account create work, duplicate cost and are error-prone.
Consolidated Billing
A customer receiving electric, broadband and water service should be able to receive a single bill showing all service charges clearly, and the total due. This requires the billing engine to pull validated usage data from different metering sources on a coordinated schedule, apply different rate structures, and produce a single presentable document.
Service-Level Rate Management
Each service type carries its own rate structures, and those structures are not interchangeable. Electric rates may include demand charges, time-of-use (TOU) components, wholesale power cost adjustments, and tiered block pricing. Water rates may include base charges, volume tiers, and irrigation differentials. Broadband is typically a flat subscription rate with potential overage charges. A multi-service CIS must manage these rate structures independently within a single billing engine.
Consolidated Payment Handling
If a customer pays a single invoice covering three services, the payment needs to be allocated correctly across each service account. If the payment is partial, the allocation rules need to be defined and consistently applied. If the account has different deposit requirements by service type, those need to be tracked separately within a single customer record.
Automated Clearing House (ACH) and IVR payment processing also need to operate off a single customer identity. Requiring a customer to make separate autopay arrangements for each service is inconvenient for the customer and can become a friction point.
Collections Coordination
And if a multi-service customer falls behind, the collections process needs to account for all service balances. The utility needs to know the combined exposure and make a disconnect decision based on the full account picture.
The Customer Experience
The customer experience is equally important, and increasingly relevant as utilities face customer expectations shaped by more sophisticated consumer platforms. Fragmented billing is a structural problem, and simplifying it has a direct effect on call volume, payment behavior, and how customers perceive their utility.
Staff Efficiency
Customer service representatives working in a multi-system environment spend a disproportionate amount of time on account navigation rather than account resolution. The impact scales with volume. Multiple systems are simply not as efficient as one.
Training also becomes more complex. New staff need to learn two interfaces, two sets of procedures, and two escalation paths when knowledge of one system does not transfer to the other.
The Growth Argument: Broadband and Beyond
Many utilities that are currently single-service or dual-service are evaluating broadband expansion, and many provide already it. According to America’s Electric Cooperatives (NRECA), more than 250 electric co-ops are deploying or developing broadband, and co-ops are on pace to connect 3.6 million homes with fiber by 2027. The existing Right-of-Way (ROW) assets and member relationships utilities already make them natural candidates for fiber-to-the-home deployment.
Federal funding has accelerated that expansion. The USDA Rural Utilities Service ReConnect Loan and Grant Program has provided $878 million to 78 cooperatives across 26 states for broadband builds reaching more than 200,000 previously unserved locations. When those projects come online, the utility adds a billing relationship with every existing member.
Utilities that build broadband operations on a native multi-service CIS foundation start with a simpler operational model and maintain it as they scale.
What to Look for When Evaluating a CIS for Multi-Service Billing
Not all CIS platforms that claim multi-service support were built that way from the ground up. Here are the questions worth asking in any evaluation.
- Is there a single customer account? Ask specifically whether a customer with three services has one account or three: the answer tells you a great deal about the underlying architecture.
- How are billing cycle dates managed across services? If your water billing cycle and your electric billing cycle are different, can they be consolidated to a single customer bill date? What is the process for doing that?
- How does the payment allocation work? If a partial payment is received on a consolidated invoice, what are the allocation rules and where are they configured?
- How is the customer portal structured? Ask for a demo of the customer-facing portal for a multi-service account.
- What happens during collections? Ask how a delinquency notice is generated for a customer with balances across two services.
- Can you speak with a utility running multi-service on this platform? Reference calls with utilities running the same combination of services you are planning are far more useful than vendor-provided case studies.
The Integration Question
Some utilities will read this and ask why not separate but well-integrated billing systems? Is integration a workable substitute for native architecture?
Integration can close some operational gaps. Real-time data exchange between a CIS and a separate broadband billing platform, for example, can produce a consolidated customer view that functions reasonably well in normal operations.
The limitations show up at the edges. When the integration fails, both platforms are unavailable for the affected workflow until the issue is resolved and data is reconciled. When either platform is upgraded, the integration must be tested and potentially reconfigured. When a new service type is added, a new integration must be built. Each integration is a dependency, a maintenance burden, and a potential failure point.
CSA’s CentralView ERP system is a true multi-service billing platform and provides automated endpoint provisioning for broadband services.[1] CSA should be at the top of your list if you’re looking for a multi-service CIS.
Related Reading
The guidance from our article on Utility ERP vs. Standalone Software: Why Integrated Platforms Win During Peak Demand applies here as well.
Talk with Our Team About Multi-Service Billing →
[1] CentralView is Central Service Association (CSA) Trademark.
The information presented in this article is intended for general educational purposes. Utility software environments vary significantly. We recommend consulting with a qualified technology advisor to evaluate solutions appropriate to your organization’s specific operational requirements.