Skipping Past the Payment and Billing Complexities to Achieve a Happier Customer Base

The human knowhow has proven to be big on a lot of different things, but there is nothing it excels more in than helping us improve at a consistent pace. This progressive approach, on our part, has already got the world to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member of the stated group. The reason why technology enjoys such an esteemed stature among people is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look up close for a second, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and consequentially, kickstarted a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, this revolution then went on to scale up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving such a monumental feat, technology will somehow continue to produce the right goods. The same has grown increasingly evident in recent times, and assuming one new fintech-themed development shakes out just like we envision, it will only make that trend bigger and better moving forward.

KUBRA, a company known for providing customer experience management solutions, has officially signed off on a strategic partnership with NorthStar to empower the latter’s utility customer experience. Under the agreed terms, the partnership will deliver at Northstar’s disposal a total of six innovative tools, including KUBRA iMail™, KUBRA EZ-PAY®, KUBRA MyHQ™, KUBRA Notifi®, Storm Center™, and IncidentWatch™, tools that will be geared towards enhancing the company’s billing, payment, and customer communications experience. Talk about how the partnership will achieve its promised value proposition on a slightly deeper level, we begin from what it will do for billing and payments. Using KUBRA EZ-PAY and KUBRA MyHQ, NorthStar will be able to offer its customers enhanced payment options, complimented through convenience of a centralized portal for all interactions. By enhanced payment options, we are basically referring to quick, secure, and flexible payments in digital, voice, or in-person payment channels, transaction details, and the ability to set up smart reminders from any device. Throw in KUBRA iMail and you can also come to expect a comprehensive bill print and mail solution featuring full-color printing, insertion, finishing, postal services, and online tracking tools. Next up, we have the prospect of more productively managing the alerts and preferences bit, where KUBRA Notifi integrates customer communication preferences with NorthStar data to deliver messages based on customer preferences, such as ideal communication methods and other relevant details. Moving on, the partnership also conceives a storm center outage mapping functionality, which like the name suggests, bears the responsibility to thrive especially during storm events. Basically, the stated functionality ensures that customers are well-informed when in the midst of such a situation. Providing them with access to estimated restoration times, crew status, outage causes, number of customers affected, and more, the functionality achieves utmost satisfaction on the customers’ part, while simultaneously reducing their reliance on a call center. Not just that, the Storm Center Map does one better by enabling you to add a wide variety of optional layers made off related information, including emergency resources, weather radar, and more.

“Our partnership with KUBRA is an exciting announcement for all. Together, we’ll be able to further elevate the customer experience and meet evolving preferences,” said Jerry Rahon, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at NorthStar. “By integrating KUBRA’s platform with our CIS software, we can continue empowering utilities to not only meet but exceed customer expectations.”

Rounding up the highlights is an incident reporting feature, which leverages KUBRA’s IncidentWatch mechanism to offer an interactive, map-based interface for customers and community stakeholders. The idea behind providing this interface is basically to locate and report issues with assets, such as street lights, and infrastructure needs, like gas leak locations, pothole repair requests, and reporting vandalism.

Making KUBRA the perfect partner for such an effort is its expansive portfolio that boasts everything from billing and payments, mapping, and mobile apps to proactive communications, and artificial intelligence solutions. The company’s excellence in providing these solutions can also be understood once you consider it has already reached well 40% of households across US and Canada. Owing to that, KUBRA facilitates, at the moment, more than 2 billion customer interactions every year. In case you still need some convincing, we can take a look at the company’s clientele, which is made up from names like nationalgrid, Aquarion Water Company, ONCOR, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, Liberty Mutual Insurance, City of Sacramento and more.

“Prior to KUBRA, we were doing the rendering of bills and letters in-house, and so being able to outsource that knowledge and that experience to KUBRA has been very nice,” said Jim Carroll, project manager at Greater Cincinnati Water Works.

As for NorthStar, founded back in 1976, the company is best known for providing utilities with cost-effective solutions to take on real-world challenges. On top of its core modular solutions that scale with your business, the company also helps you access optional value add modules for financials, consumer engagement, workforce management, business intelligence and professional services. Northstar’s excellence in actually delivering on such a comprehensive pledge is only further validated by a clientele of more than 300 utility customers, and a user base of 3.5 million active users. To give you further context about Northstar’s credentials, we can acknowledge how the company has, thus far, served the likes of IBM, Paymentus, SmartWorks, aegisys, Creditron, infosend, Moneris, Olameter, File Nexus, InvoiceCloud, Data Prose, Citybase, DataVoice, Silverblaze, and plenty others.

“NorthStar joined the KUBRA Partner Network as a partner that values customer experience as a critical factor shaping consumer behavior, much like we do,” said Rick Watkin, President and CEO of KUBRA. “We’ve designed our omni-channel billing, payment, and customer communications solutions not just to streamline and simplify billing and payments but also to create a frictionless and harmonious customer experience that strengthens NorthStar’s position as the trusted advisor to their clients.”