Looking to implement a client portal
Funny thing about service related businesses. Every time you 10X your customer base, you have to pass through new hurdles to keep growing. I read that somewhere and scoffed. Turns out, it is pretty accurate. We are just going over 1,000 customers on the KPUD network and this 10X at year end, along with the rate increase, just about made my bookkeeper strangle me. I was afraid to come into my own building on Tues/Thurs when she was working for fear of saying or doing something to upset the apple cart of trying to close the books for 2022 whilst also processing the monthly payments for January.
We are looking at implementing a customer relationship portal solution. There are several on the market, including a free one that I looked at once before, but am choosing not to go with. When we get the portal working, folks using Credit/Debit will be able to log in and see their account and make payment, change payment, change plan (speed/contract/monthly), etc. We are going to phase out paper checks. Each paper check has to be manually keyed into quickbooks and each customer has a manually maintained “Job” in Quickbooks. It is not scalable. We are going to try to automate Zelle payment processing as a lot of folks use that method.
The portal solution has some operational benefits that I never considered when starting out. It provides an authentication environment so random people cannot connect random devices to the KPUD equipment and get service. I remember when Comcast first did this back in the 90’s and I thought “that’s not needed, dumb”, I was wrong. The portal provides an automatic dunning system so if someone is too far behind on payments service is suspended until the payment is brought up to date. I avoided an automatic suspension system for years; I cannot avoid it anymore. We have too many accounts receivable aged over 45 days.
This isn’t Net253 moving to the dark side. We aren’t trying to become some opaque black hole of service that never returns calls. We aren’t primarily focused on the money. I do not have a yacht (not even a dinghy) that I am trying to increase my relaxation time on. We simply have to automate billing so we can put our revenue into internet service improvement, not administration. Finally, I have to avoid burning people out keying in information manually.