- April 18, 2024
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Fewer than 10 people have had their water shut off as the city has moved to a new online payment system, a city spokeswoman said.
The city switched from the High Cotton billing system to one by Paymentus on Oct. 7, and the city's customer service center was flooded with calls in the month of October during the changeover: about 19,000, up from about 9,000 in typical month, according to Customer Service Manager Cynthia Schweers. Some of those calls were simply to confirm that they had switched correctly, and staff worked overtime to respond to each call quickly, Schweers said.
According to Lane, the city staff worked hard to get the word out to avoid problems. In a Jan. 8 interview with the Observer, she said that, in the summer, "We had like 10 people sitting around the table, trying to figure out: 'What can we do?' We wanted to get people’s attention, and we get junk mail and a million emails, too ... an overload of information. And that’s why we really went to a big effort to notify them in a variety of ways, in hopes that the message would get through, either from email or a phone call or a letter."
"The vast majority of those customers converted to the new system without experiencing any disruption of service," city spokeswoman Cindi Lane said in an email.
But some customers didn't get the message, and one, autopay customer Bryan Boutot, wrote a letter to the editor which was printed in the Jan. 7 edition of the Palm Coast Observer.
Boutot noted that he was "not doubting (the city) made some sort of effort" to get the word out, but that he missed it and was out of town when the city shut off the water to his home, and wondered how many others also had their water shut off. In his case, he wrote, a friend who was recovering from surgery was house sitting for him when the city shut off the water, "putting her into an undeserved hardship." Boutot was able to fix the problem over the phone in less than six hours.
Boutot owns one of about 13,000 city accounts on autopay, and that's why there was an issue. Autopay customers' payment information was held by a secure third-party company and therefore couldn't be transferred from High Cotton to Paymentus automatically. So anyone on the autopay system had to re-register and submit their payment information to the new company in order for their payments to be drafted automatically again. Otherwise, they could risk having their water shut off for nonpayment.
Customers were notified of the change by email twice in September, and again Oct. 7, Lane wrote in the email. The city sent out a news release, and posted it to the city website, on Oct. 12, and notices about the change were aired on the the radio and published in the Palm Coast Observer, FlaglerLive and the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
Still, some autopay customers didn't update their information, and the city phoned them with a delinquent notice in November when their bills went unpaid. Most of those customers then updated their information, but because the city was seeing an increased number of unpaid bills, it mailed out delinquent notices by U.S. mail, then followed up with a phone call a couple of weeks later if the bill still wasn't paid, to notify them that their service would be cut off in another week. The city also changed its customer service voicemail message to notify people about the change, Lane said.
In Boutot's case, Lane wrote, the city sent him three email notifications and a mailed delinquent notice and called twice, and city records showed that in both cases someone picked up the phone, Lane said.
"We are aware of a handful of customers still didn’t get the message after all these notifications and ended up having their service disconnected," Lane wrote. "In those few cases, we have worked very hard to assist the customer in getting their service restored and account back to automatic payments."
"Through this process, the city has been very lenient with our cutoff process and late fees," Lane wrote in the email. "We suspended late fees and disconnects for a month to allow customers time to catch up with the changes in case they didn’t get the message."
Brian McMillan contributed to this story.
