LCEC Saves $3M a Year With Expanded Payment Options

ACI Customer Excellence Awards Video: Lee County Electric Cooperative

LCEC is a rural cooperative. We were founded almost 75 years ago in the Orange Groves of North Fort Myers to provide our customers reliable power. As a cooperative we are member owned, so everything we do here is about our customers. LCEC has been working with ACI since 2009 when we first rolled out our debit card credit card acceptance program.

The payment channels that ACI has provided LCEC encompass our website, our phones, and also our mobile app. Today’s customers want different ways to pay for their services. Our customers just want to be able to pull out their mobile app, pick and choose whatever options are more convenient for them. In the past we only had two payment options. Right now, our customers have such a vast variety of touch points to get payments to us, where in the past they didn’t, which increases customer satisfaction greatly.

The change in the mail payments has actually dropped from 60% of our customers back in 2009 mailing it, down to 20%.

Our customer experience indexes, how we measure our customer satisfaction, we have several surveys that we send out and one of them would be our post call survey, which is given to our customers by the representatives at the end of every call. Since we have been partnered with ACI, we have seen our customer satisfaction increase dramatically. Implementing the ACI solution has helped employee satisfaction because they feel they have a way to help customers.

Our experience with ACI has been exceptional. At least we went through an RFP process back in 2009 to see who was going to be the right partner for us. ACI has done that. They have been collaborative. We’ve had a number of discussions with the field staff and the product team about what offerings do our customers need. We have closed down two of our offices by providing our customers more convenient ways of paying. We are using that $3 million savings that we are getting each year and putting it back into our business. One in maintaining our rates if not actually lowering our rates as costs have gone up in other processes, we’ve been able now to absorb that into our operation and actually had a price decrease this year, which is one of the few electric utilities that has done that.

ACI provides us what is coming in the horizon. They let us know what options are available to us so that we can make the right choice for our customers.