Title
Resolution - A Resolution Authorizing the City Manager or Designee to Enter Into a Software as a Service Agreement (SAAS) with WaterSmart for the Renewal of the Customer Engagement and Analytics Portal
Requested Action
Consider the Resolution authorizing the renewal of a five-year SAAS agreement with WaterSmart.
Recommendation
Staff recommends approval
Description/History
Over the past five years, we have utilized WaterSmart to provide our residents with a customer-facing portal. The portal provides an interface with our customers so they have access to all the data we have available. This data is utilized to offer leak alerts, user-defined consumption notifications, water conservation recommendations, and customer messaging. The portal is also used to provide fast emergency outage notifications.
Internally the portal provides us with actionable analytics. For example, during winter storm Uri, the portal allowed us to identify leaks on our customer's lines quickly. This proved highly beneficial when we found that customers were not home to determine the leak. We also use analytics to message water conservation to individual customers. We have detected and alerted over 17,000 customer leaks using analytics and have a 99.1% positive customer sentiment relating to these notifications.
Justification
With the implementation of Tyler Munis as our new billing software, we can provide a better online presentation and payment option through the customer portal. This would act as a one-stop shop for all our customer's needs related to their water bill. The portal has been adopted at an excellent rate by our customers. Currently, 28% are registered and utilizing the portal. With the ability to provide online bill pay, we would see registration exceed 60%.
The attached order form (Attachment A) details the five-year annual costs for the SAAS. The total cost will be $318,682.38, including all the necessary support and training.
Funding Source
Utilit...
Click here for full text