Electricity Distribution Company case

Challenge

I am a manager of Electricity distribution company working in underdeveloped area. This are is still  away from telecom and internet facility. Electricity connection has reached this area just a year ago.   In the radius of 50 km there is no major town. Population of this area is also very less. Only mode of  communication here is government Post service which is available in all villages. Travel facility is by  government transport bus which covers few villages but not all. People in this area receives their  electricity bills in hard copy via postal service. By the time they receive bills, it is already late and  they have to pay fines. Many people don’t pay bills because they have to travel to 50 km to our  nearest office. Many of the users don’t pay regular bills and it piles up. Due to this issue many a  times distribution company cut their power supply pushing them back to stone age. We need to  develop a mechanism through which timely communication of bills and payment of bills can be  done. This mechanism will ensure users are getting continued electricity and they need not pay the  fine amount.

Selection

Our department have discussed this issue with the village governance body, postal service and  government bus service, Telecom provider, Internet provider, etc. We are trying to get this issue  resolved with existing infrastructure initially and then will request other departments to broaden  their reach in this area. Experiment with postal service is ongoing with postal service.

Application

In our experiment with postal service, we have requested them to visit every village after 3 days of  interval. Earlier they were waiting for certain number of letters for every village and then a postman  used to visit that village. By this experiment we studied that timely deliver of bills is possible. But  postal service is asking for more charges as they need to make more frequent trips. We are  negotiating with postal service on the amount of hike in delivery fees. But this is just a half of issue  for end users. They still have to travel 50 km to pay bills.

In the second move, we have started experiment with postal service to start a window at their  offices where bill payments will be accepted. Here we are sharing percentage of revenue collected  by these counters. We have conducted this activity for 1 billing cycle. We explain this experiment to  all village body leaders and requested them to encourage villagers to avail this.

In the meantime, we are talking to internet & telecom providers to install their infrastructure in this  area. But since it is much costly and revenue generation is negligible they are reviewing the project.

Insight

In this experiment we found that It takes 8 days to deliver a bill copy to each and every end user  from the date of dispatch of bills from our office. 8 days window is fair as the bill payment due date  is after 30 days, hence users have 22 days to pay the bill

In this experiment we found that now any user has to travel hardly to 8 km to the nearest post  office. This is still better than earlier 50 km. In the 1-month bill cycle we have observed that 80% of  users have utilized this payment service at post office. 20% users were either not much far from our  office or they were unaware/sceptical about this move.

Approach

Since we are a service provider, our prime focus is our end user. Our whole approach was to focus  on how we can make our service easy to use. User should not feel bothered while using our service.  User should feel the smoothness at all our engagement touch points.

