KUB is the largest provider of gas, electric, water and wastewater services for Knox County, Tennessee and seven adjacent counties. Although the organization operates in a non-competitive environment, KUB has a strong commitment and tradition of serving its 468,000 customers in the most efficient and effective ways possible. KUB recognized the bill is often the sole touchpoint the utility has with many of its customers and regards it as an important vehicle to offer other helpful information, such as comparative energy usage data and cost-saving tips, so customers better control their energy usage and expenses. Toward these ends, KUB issued a request for proposals to customer communications vendors, listing the features they sought, including graphical capabilities, the ability for business users at KUB to add messaging that changes from month to month, and multi-channel delivery capability. The Quadient Inspire platform fulfilled all the requirements.

Quadient Inspire is making it possible for KUB to automate and consolidate all of its bill and letter creation processes on a single platform and add and change messaging easily without the intervention of IT staff. The redesigned bill now includes information such as average weather temperatures over the month, the number of days in the billing cycle and a comparison of a customer’s energy usage from the previous month. Quadient Inspire also allows KUB to issue time-sensitive and relevant messages to customers. Another benefit has been the ability to consistently brand all communications to enhance public perception of KUB and to emphasize the value the organization brings to customers.

Tiffany Martin, director of customer experience at KUB, said, “Communication is extremely important to KUB. With a utility, often customers don’t have a choice of providers, so our job is to make sure that customers feel informed and empowered and have as much information as possible. We measure our success on how satisfied our customers are and seek opportunities to make sure that we’re communicating effectively with them. This bill project is just one of the many projects that we are doing to make sure that we give customers the information they need.”

While KUB currently uses multiple platforms, including web, email, texting, and social media for customer communication, Quadient Inspire will allow enhanced omni-channel communication via email and SMS text notifications with images from the bill in the future, further improving the customer experience.

“We’re pleased that Quadient Inspire is providing KUB with the ability to achieve its goal of creating a technically-optimized monthly bill that informs and empowers its customers,” said John Hoggard, principal, Global Utilities & Telco, Quadient. “KUB now joins an impressive global list of leading energy and utility companies that are leveraging Quadient technologies to create and deliver personalized, compliant customer communications across all channels, from one centralized hub.”