City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

Good morning everyone, I am the advisor Michael Holmes and I declare open the meeting of September 16 of the technical committee on transparency, commitment and communication. Today in the classroom with me there is the advisor Harmon, the advisor Williams is coming and the advisor Moore will be absent today. We have only one information point, so no action will be necessary, namely the point 2026.322 presentation of the messaging service for customers of the public services of the city of High Point. Jeremy Cobb, Director of the Customer Service, will give the presentation.

Good morning, Jeremy. Good morning to all, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Council. I am pleased to be here this morning and to talk about some of the progress made in the customer service thanks to the technology we have implemented So we will talk about our messaging system this morning. What is the purpose of our messaging platform? It is to make daily needs of customers easier and more autonomous. This is a very important aspect in many areas of our life and the city also wants to be part of it. So what can we do? Customers can check the balance, the status of the account or receive notice of stay. They can sign service interruptions. I will elaborate on this in a moment. A very important element is the possibility of confirming the return of electricity in case of problems. It really offers customers a quick and easy way to interact with the city even when the offices are not operational in the evening or at the end of the week. Let's take a look at August 2026. These are very recent data. As you can see, we have sent and received almost 20,000 messages. We have had interruptions of current and refunds. You will want to know about these points in a few minutes. Mora warnings, we are very proud of them. Mora warnings are an additional element that we use to let people know that we want their account to be in order to avoid interruptions of services, In addition to this, of course, we send letters and use our interactive voice systems. So now let's face the question from three different points of view. Jump requests. It is one of the most frequent calls to our call center. Interrupting signal. You see that the number of faulty signals is low. This is a good thing. Let me explain it to you. To signal a failure is the way in which historically we have notified the electric company that there was a power outage. Thanks to the progress in AMI, we know very quickly and often before the customer realizes that the current is missing. And so this has reduced the need for customers to contact us. In fact, it is up to us to warn them, as those two bars at the top show. Since July 2025 we have managed almost 150,000 interactions through messages. It's incredible, it's incredible. This means one call less, one visit less to the Sportello and allows our municipal staff to dedicate themselves to more productive activities. Let's talk about a more specific aspect of our messages, that is, the warnings of loss or continuous consumption. To give some context, thanks to LAMY we are able to monitor the water meters and detect continuous consumption. This means that the water flows through the meter 24 hours a day. Once we have reached a critical point, that is, if we record 48 hours of continuous consumption, we try to send a notification. It is not normal that in a house the water flows for 48 hours in a row, so there is probably something wrong. We have analyzed almost 10,000 events since we started this program. We sent over 4,000 notifications to more than 3,000 different sites. To be precise, we have sent these notifications to some people more than once. The system is configured so that, if the loss persists, we send another notification after 90 days, in case you forgot or to remind you. We have reached over 2,000 unique customers. we had a success rate of 70% when reaching these customers and I will talk about how to improve that remaining 30% we had 5000 notifications that they did not find a recipient and I would like to focus on this aspect and 969 customers that we were not able to contact as mentioned in the previous slides the reason is that we do not have updated contacts So my call today to everyone present and to the public is give us your best contacts. As you will see in the next slide there are potential real economic savings. This is probably the slide I'm most proud of. looking at this figure of $ 345,000 it is a estimate based on the comparison between customers who received the notice of loss and intervened compared to those who we were not able to reach so we estimate up to $ 345,000 a very cautious approach would lead to $ 175,000 this is a return on the real investment not only for lami but also for the messages the solutions we have implemented the citizens of high point have bought all this and we want to make sure that they can take advantage and use it from our analysis emerged that the customers of which we have the correct data if they have a loss and most of them are very small they save on average 80 dollars a month on the bill they are real money that is accumulated It is about transforming information into better communication. And we are only at the beginning. We will continue to expand all this. We will use more text messages in other areas as soon as they are available. We will continue the process of removing losses. We are expanding that process as much as possible. We have interruption points if we do not have a contact or we cannot reach you and you have a serious loss, we will invite someone to close the water as a memorial. here is my promise update your contact information really this is to your advantage you can do it through the client portal that I highly recommend where you can view all the consumptions You can go on the website, you can call us, you can sell people. We are happy to help you in any way. However, we cannot communicate if we do not have your contact details. So give us your cell phone number to receive a warning via SMS or your email to receive the warning via email. You can receive both or only one of the two as you prefer. We just want to make sure that the public can exploit the wonderful things we have put into practice here. I will conclude with this statement. It is a clear path from the viewing. In the past we faced all this with a minimum delay of 30 days when the ticket arrived. Sometimes it took even longer. At that point the customer had damaged the house and a very high ticket. This created a lot of work not only for the customer but also for the city and this really solved the problems. I know it was rather short, but I'm available for any questions. Do we have any questions from the council? I have two. Yes, sir. Right now. So why did you wait 48 hours? I mean, why did you decide that that was the moment when continuous water becomes a problem compared to 24 hours? This is a really good question. Well, we actually used sector standards when we came up with it. So, a curiosity that I like to boast about is that we are one of the few services companies in the country to do it on this scale. However, we know the others who do it. There are some companies, and one of these are our twin cities in South Carolina, to which we are very inspired, and they have taken many lessons from this. For 24 hours they discovered that it ended up generating many false positives. So we spent 48 hours, based on some recommendations not only theirs, but also of some system engineers who helped us design it from the beginning.

Not only curious, I mean the entity of the loss.

In short, it is a matter of having a water that loses or something like that, but if something really breaks and the water drips out, that is a metric that could also be used in the future. Like if something unexpected happens, like wow, something is happening, maybe they are on vacation and they come home finding it. We do it. Yes, we use that metric. It's a question. I can tell you that over 90% of the losses we encounter are probably due to the sealing of the sink, really. And I don't think people realize how many liters or meters of water cubes can pass through a water, but there are many. So, in your case, we have had many examples of people outside the city to whom we were able to close the water. Our limits are set at over 40 cubic feet per hour and, based on statistical analysis, as you said, it is very likely that it is a break in the pipe and not a loss or a tap that drips. So, with those 40 cubic feet per hour, we have staff that monitors the situation every day. It's part of their mission. And if they notice that improvement, they immediately get on the van, they go upstairs, they go to the place, they check and close the water. And then they leave a warning at the door, they knock trying to get in touch with that customer. Fantastic. So there are about 2,000 people registered for this service. And what is the total number of customers? High point. I mean, I imagine that the question is what is the percentage that really suffers from me. Yes, I would just like to make a small clarification. I would not necessarily say that the loss warnings are really an inscription. We use them based on the information present in their receipts. So, in reality, when you create your account, we take a phone number, I send emails and all that stuff. Over time, people change numbers, but they don't update it for us. We have a small note in the ballot every month. If this is not your number, we ask you to contact us. We are pushing on this aspect and I think this is exactly the difference we are referring to.

Exactly.

Okay, thank you.

So Jeremy, thank you for the presentation. This is a really innovative and efficient job. I think that all of us as citizens appreciate a government that tries to operate more efficiently and economically. As far as the expansion of the capacity and the scope of this program is concerned, our residents must voluntarily join, they must ... and only. The reason why I ask is that in the era of spam via SMS I know that people receive all sorts of messages all day and I fear that this can be lost in the sea of messages they receive. How are you fighting the nature of spam, of this type of service?

It is an excellent question and it has been the subject of many internal conversations on our part, because in fact many messages are received, so you can say no. If you want, you can select the option to receive no more. I think the only approach is to be aware of the fact that part of these messages will be lost in the sea of ​​sms that people receive. One of the things we worked on with the P.I.O. office, which gave me excellent advice, they said that with this messaging platform, to prevent people from ignoring it, everything we send must be strictly professional and linked to their specific users. And he doesn't know, when we launched it, and the optimism was in the stars, to say, let them know all kinds of things. Let's talk about this. Let's do that too. And you know, I was stopped and I'm happy about it because it would have come out of the scope planned for this messaging platform. We have other communication channels to inform us about July 4th and other similar things. So I would say that this is our best attempt, but it is not a perfect solution at all. Other questions?

The question I was about to ask. I think that, being the person here with more gray hair on his head, it's a shame for Chris.

I think it's about educating people, we are very cautious, you know.

Many people are really careful about this aspect.

And I think you answered the question, but that's exactly the hesitation about it. I would like to add something else and I hope it goes well, since I'm about to point out someone here. Excuse me, in the audience there is a change that we have brought to the customer service as we advanced with this technology. And you used the perfect word, it's about education. And it's about the customer experience. So a new member of our staff, if you want to raise your hand, Ms. Céline Berniatos is here and she is responsible for the customer experience. It's not just managing SMS notifications, web sites and all the general content we see, but also understanding how to get out into the community and build that necessary trust. It's a novelty, people are hesitant, so we have to get to know each other and we are starting to participate in more community events by doing more presentations. So we hope to see you around and talk more about it.

Well then, welcome. And she said it's me.

Welcome.

Well, welcome to the team. We are happy to have you here and this is a really important part of the experience that people have with our government. So thank you for joining the team. If there are no other questions for the technical committee, the session is adjourned.