The town of Wake Forest has chosen SmartGridCIS to support a Prepay Pilot for its residential customers which will be branded Pay-As-You-Go Electricity.
Wake Forest Power, the electric utilities division of Wake Forest, strives hard to provide customer-friendly programs and services at the lowest reasonable cost. Consistent with this goal, Wake Forest was looking for a low cost, low risk opportunity to pilot prepaid electricity as a customer choice program. After looking at a number of options, it selected the SmartGridCIS Express platform to support the pilot.
SmartGridCIS Express will be deployed as a stand-alone prepay billing/CIS solution, allowing Wake Forest to more closely manage, monitor and evaluate the benefits of prepay. “We did not see the benefit of integrating immediately to our existing billing system,” said Mike Barton, director of Public Works and Utilities. “Our clear preference was to go with a flexible, stand-alone prepay solution for the pilot.”
The SmartGridCIS Express solution will provide the Wake Forest customer service team with robust functionality out-of-the-box, including account management, customer notifications, automated meter control and meter data retrieval, real-time payment processing, etc. And Wake Forest customers can access their prepay account via their MyAccount portal to proactively manage payments, view usage history, communication history, and set notification preferences.
