For the final post in our 25th Anniversary Series, Brandon Rozema, Revenue Assurance Manager at Black Hills Energy, explains the growth and customer trust they’ve built from outsourcing their billing modernization and production with Doxim.
During COVID, we saw an opportunity to redesign our bills to offer our customers greater transparency and clarity and to outsource our in-house billing operations to an external vendor. Up until that point, we were really ‘old school.’ Our bills were black and white, and we hadn’t changed the design in several years.
Doxim offered the capability to add color and feature best-in-class utility bill designs, as well as the option to outsource. Those were the reasons we chose to partner with Doxim.
Learning to Let Go
We outsourced during COVID, which was a trying time, but Doxim brought their A-game. They’re a full-service customer communications management provider with the expertise we needed to get started.
We had never outsourced before. And, I’ll be honest, we had a tough time letting go. We’re an organization that prefers to own everything ourselves. But Doxim gave us the freedom to have our marketing team design the bill internally, which they then imported into their portal.
Whenever challenges or issues came up, Doxim brought practical solutions. They brought their best-in-class expertise to the table and gave us the space to work with them to accommodate our preferences.
Tackling a Sophisticated Utility Bill Redesign
Black Hills Energy is a complicated business operating in eight states with different tariffs, requiring a sophisticated bill print and design process. We tried to standardize things as much as possible, but each state has unique requirements. Working through those details with Doxim and seeing the design come together made it a pretty fantastic outcome for a challenging project.
What we have today is night-and-day better than what we had before. The new bill design allows us to bucket changes into four categories and explain to customers what each category includes. It’s more relevant and tailored to every customer.
Doxim provided modular sections that allow us to include situational or personalized details on the bill, such as insight into why their usage may have increased. We simply didn’t have that flexibility in the past.
Confidence in Doxim from Day One
Doxim’s expertise really stood out to us during onboarding. The team brought examples, showed options, and helped us see opportunities we hadn’t thought about because we were accustomed to our old design. From gathering data to testing, we developed a real partnership built on collaboration.
Any time there were issues, Doxim always provided solutions. I don’t think we had any setbacks, and customer support has been fantastic. For example, when we were working through an issue with page numbering, our Doxim support representative helped us resolve it. She did the research, provided options, sent test documents, and offered gentle reminders about outstanding concerns. While we’re used to doing the job in-house and getting instant answers, Doxim’s support team always returns our call faster than the 24-hour SLA. They take our business as seriously as we do.
Because we printed in-house for so long, we never missed a day getting bills out and delivered. That was the expectation with Doxim, too. And any time issues came up, such as a server delay on our side or theirs, they jumped on it, figured out what was wrong, and explained when bills would hit the post office.
That’s huge for us. USPS delays can shorten the number of days customers have to pay, so urgency and accuracy matter.
Results Felt Throughout the Organization
The benefits were there. We just didn’t realize it straight out of the gate because we took on the role of overseer. We’d never really done that before.
Outsourcing saved us from needing to invest heavily in new equipment to support color printing. It freed up real estate in our corporate office during a time when we were running out of space. Looking back, things felt different about a year after we outsourced. Our work became more about sitting at a desk, ensuring proper quality assurance, instead of managing production.
As for the results of working with Doxim, transparency for our customers and visibility into the billing process from start to finish are also significant benefits. We like to know where things are in the process to ensure nothing gets missed or dropped. Having the ability to just look and see where documents are in Doxim’s portal truly helps to build trust while helping us maintain our autonomy.
Partnering with Doxim has improved Black Hills Energy’s delivery of bill print from end to end. The expertise and experience Doxim brought made us more comfortable with letting go of control, and the delivered product has been exceptional. It ensures our customers interpret what we’re billing them for and helps our agents answer calls with clarity.
Ultimately, it’s transformed our business.
