6 Critical Questions to Ask When Choosing a Utility Billing Partner

The buyouts of small, independent utility billing firms by conglomerates are degrading customer service, as we talked about in our article on commodity takeovers of utility billing.

After a small billing service is acquired, the customers typically start to experience major service problems, such as:

• Painfully slow delivery of billing packages
• No sanity checks on billing data
• Refusal to come on-site
• Fees for asking questions (because yes, some companies are doing this now)
• Requirements to purchase proprietary equipment to connect with their system, increasing your costs
• No one picking up the phone

These changes are more than irritating: they also increase your billing costs, increase tenant disputes, and reduce your utility cost recovery – the very opposite of customer service. If you’re concerned about impacts on your NOI, here’s a list of questions to help you assess the actual quality and capability of any billing provider.

Here are our top 6 questions for evaluating a billing provider.

Don't Pay More for a Data Entry Shop!

Your billing service is key to recovering more in utility costs and decreasing tenant disputes. You need a service capable of understanding the complexity of multiple utilities, meter types, and tenant lease terms. Otherwise, you’re paying twice – once for them to do the billing packages and then again for you to track down and correct their errors. Who has time for that?