by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
It was cold and windy at 7:29 a.m. last Wednesday morning at 43 W. Church St. The sky was also overcast and looked like any minute it might start to rain.
None of that stopped Joseph Dean from standing on the sidewalk waiting for the doors to open at the JEA’s Customer Center. He lives in San Marco, and one day each month he makes a detour Downtown on his way to work to hand the money for his utilities bill to one of the payment specialists working at the counter.
“I just don’t trust the mail anymore, and I don’t trust the Internet either,” said Dean.
He’s not alone.
According to Sandra Copney, JEA’s director of customer contacts and whose job it is to study customer behavior, preference concerning how residents and businesses pay their bill is evenly split among three groups.
About one-third of the people who get the monthly bill for the utility’s 878,000 electric and water service accounts prefer to transact business in person. Most pay with cash at the Downtown center or one of the six branch offices. Another third pay by mailing a check each month, and the rest pay electronically, either at www.jea.com or through the pay-by-phone system.
Copney said there will always be a segment of the customer base that will always pay in person with cash because they want a receipt in their hand when they leave. Some, she said, have made it a habit because they have gotten to know the people who take their payment each month.
“There’s also the fact that 12 percent of Jacksonville’s population is low income and many of those customers don’t have checking accounts,” she added. “There also are people who have to make a payment that can be posted as quickly as possible to avoid having their service interrupted.”
For customers who would rather avoid buying a stamp or logging on to the Web, JEA is about to introduce a new third-party payment option.
Beginning in March, terminals will be up and running at 65 convenience stores and other locations to collect and process payments to JEA. Most sites will be open 7 a.m.-10 p.m. seven days a week and payments will be credited within a half-hour of being deposited. Customers will also be able to make a payment without their bill if they can provide their account number.
The new system is through an arrangement with Fidelity Express, a Texas-based firm that entered the Jacksonville market several years ago to sell money orders at convenience stores
Copney said JEA is always looking for new ways to “offer options to make paying their bill as convenient as possible for every customer.”
She also believes it will become a popular way to pay and expects the new service will be used by as many as 50,000 customers as soon as it debuts.
“You’ll be able to pay your bill at the same place you buy your gas or where you stop to pick up something you need on the way home,” said Copney. “If people like the new locations, it may grow beyond 50,000 a month.”
The new option will also be attractive for the community-owned, not-for-profit utility’s bottom line.
“We know it costs $3.82 to process a payment made at a branch. The third-party transaction will only cost 51 cents,” said Copney, who also pointed out the JEA, not the customer, will pay the third-party payment fee.
In addition, there is no capital investment on JEA’s part to install and maintain the system. Those costs will be covered by the provider.
When Dean discovered he and his many fellow in-person payers will soon have 65 more options to transact their business with JEA, his face lit up and he said, “That will be great!”
JEA Third Party Payment Sites
(Effective March 1)
Source: JEA