Arlington Water Utilities Recognized with Citizen Service Award
By Traci Peterson, Arlington Water Utilities
Posted on February 21, 2020, February 21, 2020

Arlington Water Utilities was one of 17 federal, state and local entities throughout the country recognized this week as a winner in the 2019 Granicus Digital Government Awards, which honor transformational digital government initiatives.

Arlington Water Utilities was one of 17 federal, state and local entities throughout the country recognized this week as a winner in the 2019 Granicus Digital Government Awards, which honor transformational digital government initiatives.

Arlington Water Utilities’ Know Your H2O customer website and other features related to the department’s remote read meter program won one of three awards in the Citizen Service category. Granicus, which is the leading provider of cloud-based software solutions and digital engagement services for the public sector, highlighted Arlington’s efforts to improve communications with customers.

“With a combination of email, online surveys, social media, and their department’s dedicated website, the department is transforming to meet the digital habits of residents while reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, preserving the planet’s most valuable resource,” the award announcement said.

Almost 72,000 Arlington Water Utilities customers, or more than half the city, have had their water meters replaced with remote read meters in the past 5 years. As a way to build on that new technology, Arlington Water Utilities has compiled a suite of enhanced digital services over the past eighteen months to give customers new ways to control their water bills and use this valuable resource responsibly.

Arlington’s Know Your H2O website is an update to the department’s customer account website that went online in November 2018. It allows residents with remotely read water meters to see their daily water meter readings online and compare them with weather trends and past usage. It also contains other account information, including up to two years of past bills for accounts with any style of water meter.

In the months since the initial roll out, the water department’s staff have worked to add even more features, including high bill and high usage email alerts for residents with remote read meters. In fall 2019, an automated program written in-house began allowing residents to receive proactive continuous water usage email alerts, letting the customers know sooner about a possible household leak so they can take quick action. In just a weeks, the feature had already been mentioned by several residents on a local Facebook page as saving them from a costly leak.

In addition to the rollout of the website and alert features, Arlington Water worked with the City of Arlington’s Office of Communications on a coordinated campaign to spread the word about the new site. It included a video available on YouTube, postcards mailed to residents with remotely read meters, social media posts and other advertising.

The campaign also used data that is collected in-house to gear marketing efforts toward those most likely to benefit. Those efforts included:

• Postcards sent to the 400 highest residential water users (according to data from the past year), letting them know about the new website and its useful features.

• An email introduction to Know Your H2O sent to 11,00 customers who were already Know Your H2O users but had not signed for high usage alerts.

• An email survey has been sent to the first 500 residents to sign up for high usage, high bill alerts to determine their experiences and motivation for signing up.

In just a few years, the entire city of Arlington will have remotely read water meters. Arlington department will continue to promote the informative website and the alerts it offers residents. The department expects that as more people sign up, satisfaction with the control it provides over water usage and billing will also multiply.

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