About Belen
The regional utility department in Belen, New Mexico, plays a crucial role in serving the city’s citizens and managing their billing needs. Beyond its primary function of collecting payments for water utilities, the utility department also assumes the responsibility of processing payments on behalf of various other municipal departments. The complexity and volume of Belen’s billing means it needs a trustworthy partner to uphold its customer service commitments.
The challenge
Belen’s Utility Department used both utility billing software and a webbased online bill payment system. The payment system was outdated and slow to scale its capabilities, relying heavily on the clerks’ manual input.
While the Utility Department needed a state-of-the art, easy-to-integrate payment processing platform, some residents of Belen needed encouragement to change their existing bill-paying processes. Older citizens, meanwhile, are unaccustomed to relying on technology for day-today tasks. It was crucial, therefore, to provide citizens with a seamless, easyto-use payment platform that improved adoption and minimized late payments.
The solution
Nuvei first needed to establish an integration with Belen’s utility billing software, and consider how to best engage their citizens. In addition, it had to provide walk-in payment capabilities for other departments. Whilst integrating the Nuvei Government Suite solution, Nuvei worked with the client to create a targeted marketing campaign to encourage citizens to use the new system.
Critically, Belen’s Utility Department needed the system to improve the timeliness of payments, increase the use of online transactions, and reduce the overall number of customer calls and walk in payments. Nuvei Government Suite was ideal. It featured multi-lingual capabilities, citizen engagement features, multi-property management, and walk-in shopping cart functionality.
The platform also allowed citizens to set their preferred communication channels; via SMS or email. That meant the department could remind bill payers about late payments, upcoming payments, or simply encourage them to sign up for automatic payments.
