Clark Public Utilities is a customer-owned utility providing electric and water service in Clark County, Washington. They currently provide electric service to more than 180,000 customers and water service to approximately 30,000 homes and businesses. Clark Public Utilities is committed to exceeding customer service expectations and makes customer satisfaction a top goal across the entire organization. To prove that point, they were recently selected as a winner of a major service award from a nationally recognized customer satisfaction research firm. Selected as one of only 40 organizations in the United States, Clark Public Utilities was chosen as one of the highest performing organizations that deliver service excellence to U. S. customers.

Over the past several years, Clark Public Utilities has reduced their operating costs to become a very efficiently run utility. A part of the efficiency strategy involved implementing software technology designed to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Solimar Systems interviewed Steve Sheerin, Systems Programming Administrator at Clark Public Utilities to discuss how implementing Solimar technology has enabled them to reduce operating expenses while aiming to increase customer satisfaction levels.

Clark Public Utilities wanted to overhaul their electronic document viewing capabilities to include the delivery and viewing of internal reports and customer utility bills. Their previous system had limited viewing capabilities and was awkward when performing document retrieval searches. The system did not allow for granular search criteria that allowed employees to find documents quickly. As a result, employees experienced lost productivity time when trying to search for needed documents. There were also concerns over the system’s overall reliability and ability to scale.

Clark Public Utilities also had a goal of placing electronic versions of customer utility bills on their website for self-service access. Their objective was to create the document viewing experience that mirrored the printed versions – the utility bills on the website needed to be exactly the same as the printed bills that were mailed to customers. Unlike the limitations of the previous system, the web presentment bills needed to look identical to the printed bills, including all fonts, line endings, images, page endings, etc. Clark Public Utilities began to look for a new solution to meet their current document viewing requirements and future goals to increase customer satisfaction.

After a search of products and vendors, Solimar’s SOLsearcher™ Enterprise (SSE) product was selected. The outstanding support provided to Clark Public Utilities with another Solimar product helped them make the decision. Clark Public Utilities had been using Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE) for several years to manage and control their print output. Their past experience with Solimar as a reliable and trusted vendor was a major factor in the decision process.

“As a current SPDE user, we were already a Solimar customer,” said Sheerin. “We always receive superior service from Solimar’s technical support staff. I approached our Solimar sales rep and explained what we wanted to do. We discussed the current usage of our SPDE product and how we could best utilize and leverage it to easily generate PDF documents for our web presentment needs. This discussion led us to a logical decision to go with SOLsearcher Enterprise. The combined solution of SPDE and SOLsearcher work very well for us.”

The combination of SPDE and SOLsearcher provides Clark Public Utilities the ability to control and manage both their printed output and their electronic documents.

“Throughout the set up and implementation, the Solimar technical staff was fantastic,” said Sheerin. “Solimar’s Company reputation and industry experience made our implementation decision much easier. They offered the best software solution to satisfy our requirements.”

The Solimar solution comprised of SPDE and SSE have significantly cut Clark Public Utilities’ operating expenses. Savings have occurred by reducing development resource requirements, reducing manual control costs, and lowering expenses by deploying industry standard technology. “With our Solimar solution, we are saving $28,000 per year and have seen increased customer satisfaction ratings,” said Sheerin.

SOLsearcher is now providing a powerful and highly secure electronic document delivery and web presentment solution for Clark Public Utilities’ customer service department. It enables agents to effectively index, store, search and quickly retrieve large collections of documents, including their internal reports. In the future, it will allow Clark Public Utilities customers to access and view their own utility bills 24/7.

Delivering outstanding customer service and support is extremely important to Solimar Systems as well. Solimar’s technical support team helped Clark Public Utilities implement the solution and continues to support them whenever help is needed.

“I have been in an IS position for more than 30 years, and worked with more product support individuals and teams that I can remember, but none have had the product knowledge and the customer treatment that I have experienced with the Solimar support staff,” said Sheerin.