JoAnne Brunet Obituary

In a move that company officials say is the first step in improving efficiency and customer service, the Chester Metropolitan District (CMD) will discontinue sending out reminder notices as of Sept. 1.
According to a press release from CMD, the change will not impact the amount of time a customer has to pay their bill; they will still have the same number of days to pay their bill.
CMD offers automatic bank drafts for its customers; most bills are due about the same day of each month. The bank draft service, which is free to customers, ensures the bill is paid on time.
"We're encouraging people to sign up for automatic draft, which takes having to come by the offices out of the mix," said CMD Executive Director Fred Castles. "Automatic draft is very convenient; you don't have to worry about it, you're not going to be late or get disconnected," he said.
Castles and Finance Manager Rebecca Moon sat down with The N&R to explain the change about the reminder notices in more detail.
"We have several billing cycles throughout the month for the various areas around our district," said Castles. "Essentially, we have bills that go out one cycle per week. From the date of the bill, the customer has 10 days to pay their bill without a late fee of $2. Then there is an additional 10 days before the account is subject to disconnection."
"Currently (until Sept. 1, 2017) we send out a reminder notice (which according to the CMD website, is sent 16 days after the original bill was mailed) which is a courtesy reminder, to customers who have not paid their bills," said Castles.
According to the website, if a customer is disconnected, the entire bill is due, plus a reconnect fee (and an additional charge if the service has to be reconnected after hours).
"What brought on the discontinuing of the courtesy reminder notice is in response to our billing department being able to get bills out on time. With the delivery of bills sometimes being erratic, we're doing this in an effort to address that issue.
"When you send out reminder notices, it takes time to go through the accounts, pull the delinquent accounts, prepare reminder notices, get them ready for mailing and send them out. All of that paper stock has a cost associated with it, and there are man-hours tied up in staff preparing these reminder notices – which means during those times, they're not doing billing," Castles pointed out.
"Really, this is a push to get our billing back on time. We recently had some software upgrades that were made about a year ago, and we haven't had good success once the software company required us to make the upgrade," said Castles.
"There have been some bugs that have made it difficult for us to maintain any kind of frequency with our billing cycle," he said.
Castles said the software bugs did not affect the amount of time people had to pay their bill – that did not change, but there had been some trouble with the automatic date imprinted on the bill that stated the date the bill was due not being the right date.
And where this happened, Castles pointed out, CMD had sent out announcements when there was an error. For a reminder, he mentions that recently, the garbage collection rates (CMD bills these for the City of Chester) reverted to the 2001 rates, and CMD made the public aware of this error.
"The software is one of the reasons that has caused the billing to slip," Castles said.
CMD has a plan in place to upgrade the software to a more contemporary and user-friendly software starting in July with full implementation by January 2018, he added.
The new software will have more features and more online features that customers will be able to access, such as additional payment options.
CMD is also continuing to replace all of the meters in the district starting in July.
All of these changes mean CMD will be able to prepare the bills in a more timely fashion, said Castles.
He said customers get their bills about the same time each month, and they pay them about the same time each month,
"People have sort of a "cadence" to how and when and what part of the month they pay certain bills; when it comes to the water bill, some pay right at the penalty date and some that pay at the end of 20 days. People have behaviors and that's how they pay, whether that coincides with their pay schedule or whatever.
"I don't believe discontinuing the reminder notices will have a significant impact on when people pay their bill," he said.
Basically, he added, CMD is doing away with the reminder notices because having to prepare them has caused extra work when the billing department should concentrate on sending out the bills.
Castles said the software CMD is looking at implementing does offer many options, such as an email or text alert to customers when bills are due or past due.
"We will be encouraging customers to send us their email address or cell numbers so they can receive those types of alerts," said Castles.
Castles encourages customers to drop by the CMD office at 155 Wylie St. in Chester between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. to sign up for the automatic bank draft and for additional payment options, visit the website at www.cmdsd.com.