Client Profile: Monroe, OH

Advanced Revenue Management Capabilities Provide Faster Access to Information and Improved Customer Support

• Industry: Municipality
• Location: Monroe, OH
• Number of Employees: 133
• Population: 15,412
• Tyler Client Since: 2009
• Tyler Products Used: Enterprise ERP, powered by Munis^®, Time & Attendance, powered by ExecuTime™, Content Manager, Enterprise Asset Management, Open Finance, Cashiering, Payments

Challenge

On an average day, the city of Monroe, Ohio, processes more than 250 utility payments. Dawn Levandusky, finance operations manager, leads a team of community service specialists responsible for processing all payments. Before Levandusky decided to transition the city’s solution to Tyler’s Payments platform, she noted the problems the team had — which included a process that was not always up to date, leading to delays in customer support and staff resources.

“As an example, if a holiday fell on a Friday, the specialists would have to import Friday, Saturday, and Sunday batches on Monday morning when returning to the office,” said Levandusky. “If a customer called Monday morning to check on an account balance, the information would not be accurate until those batches were imported.”

These problems directly impacted their community with residents having limited access to information for a short period while specialists were making manual updates. This was a daily issue for the city, and it was an even greater challenge following weekends or holidays.

Solution

In order to enhance their payment processing experience, the city turned to Tyler’s Payments solution to process their utility payments. Today, the city’s change to the cloud-based application has afforded the team immediate and maximum availability to support their community, opportunities to become more efficient, with payers now having a more consistent paying experience.

The switch to Payments empowered the team — and their community — to access data without any delay. Staff members can now access real-time information, making it possible for the city to answer customer questions quickly and correctly at any time during their hours of operation.

“Tyler’s Payments solution communicates directly with Enterprise ERP in real time allowing our specialists to see the transactions immediately and creating efficiencies in their daily processes,” said Levandusky. “The community service specialists only have to print the daily batch report and the supporting bank page.”

Before the transition, reconciliation was complicated and inefficient. The specialists had to perform a manual reconciliation to compare transactions when batch and bank totals did not match. “This process was tedious and difficult to perform while also handling resident calls and in-person visits,” Levandusky said. “The Tyler Payments [reconciliation] process freed up time for our community service specialists to complete other tasks. It also allows staff to easily see transactions that did not reconcile properly, and it is simple as the click of a button to re-attempt the reconciliation.”

Residents of Monroe also benefited from the change in customer service. When payers use the Payments solution they are taken through an easy-to-use experience or a “one-stop-shop for all payment and transaction data,” as Levandusky stated. The application’s experience allows payers to take advantage of benefits like payment scheduling, paperless billing, bill and payment history for any bill at any time, and much more.

”The Tyler Payments team was phenomenal to work with, they were responsive to any issues we encountered throughout the implementation,” Levandusky said.