Billing errors plague CUI

After two months of errors on her Chestermere Utilities Inc. (CUI) bills, Deb Fleece is raising concerns over the billing process at Chestermere’s utility company.
“I don’t trust them now,” said Fleece who plans to be extra vigilant when reading her bills from now on.
The first error that she noticed came with her November bill which showed her October bill as unpaid and included late charges for it. Upon checking, Fleece discovered she had never received a bill for October.
After calling CUI, Fleece had the late fees dropped.
The second error came with her most recent bill that arrived on Jan. 8 and showed that she would have to pay late fees if the bill wasn’t paid by Dec. 31, 2017.
Again, after calling CUI she was able to confirm that it was a typo and she would not be automatically billed a late fee.
In addition to errors on her bill, she has spoken with neighbours who have had the same problems. Fleece is concerned about how wide spread the problem is and how many residents may have just paid the late fees.
“And I’m wondering if people are actually paying this five bucks or whatever a month,” said Fleece.
While she has been satisfied with CUI’s response when presented with the errors, as someone who works as an administrative professional, Fleece can’t understand what is going on to lead to so many billing errors.
CUI CEO Leigh-Anne Palter said that while she can’t speak to individual customers concerns, can confirm that CUI has had some problems with recent billing cycles.
“We did have a glitch this past weekend when we were running our bills,” said Palter.
Palter explained that CUI has a billing system that relies on significant manual staff input.
“We have 33 different routes and we go through and we manually process each of those routes,” she said, “and we got through the first 12 batches by about midnight on Friday and realized that it was printing the wrong date on the bill.”
The error occurred because of a missed field that needed to be changed with the start of the new year.
Palter said that the error affected about 1100 bills.
“Unfortunately, one of the limitations of our systems is that we have no way to re-process the bills,” she said.
“We caught the error, we fixed it for the balance of the bills that we issued but unfortunately those bills went out with the wrong date on them,” said Palter.
Since the error was known to them, Palter said that they have taken steps to let the affected customers know, including e-mail those individuals that they have contact e-mails for.
“We’re apologizing and we’ve since updated our website and our Facebook page to proactively advise people of the issue,” she said.
In addition to this most recent mistake, Palter admits that they have faced challenges with their bills of late.
“What I can tell you more broadly is that we’ve had a bit of a bad run I can’t deny that,” she said.
The former billing manger left the company suddenly while two other key employees have been off due to illness.
“With a small team when you get caught with something like that…things fall through the cracks and you make some mistakes,” said Palter.
“We do acknowledge that there’ve been a few hiccups, more hiccups than we’d like in the last couple of billing runs,” she said.
Palter realizes that, these kinds of errors are frustrating for customers and diminishes their confidence in CUI.
Palter said that they are back to full staff and she believes that things at CUI have stabilized a bit.
She said that have implemented new process that are intended to minimize the opportunity for human error when preparing customer’s bills.
They are also continuing with a review of the entire system.
“One of the things we started last year and will carry over into this year is we’re doing a stem to stern review of our entire billing policies processes and procedures,” said Palter.
She said that anyone with a concern or question about their bill should call or e-mail CUI.
“We’ll follow up with them and make it right,” said Palter.