Overview
Cleveland Water (CWD) is the water and wastewater billing utility for the City of Cleveland and several surrounding jurisdictional partners, including the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, Euclid, Strongsville, North Olmsted, Fairview Park, Bedford Heights, and Newburgh Heights. Following the 2009 go-live of a new billing and customer information platform (CC&B), the utility's meter-to-cash cycle began to break down: accounts receivable climbed from roughly $19.0 million in September 2009 to $43.1 million by July 2011, backlogs of pended and suppressed bills grew, tens of thousands of field activities went unresolved, and the call center fell well short of industry service standards.
With customer trust eroding and jurisdictional partners depending on accurate, timely billing, Cleveland City Council's Public Utilities Committee needed a disciplined, metrics-driven recovery effort — and an independent set of eyes on whether the fixes being reported were actually taking hold. Cleveland Water engaged tieBridge to serve on the program management team for the CWD Customer Service Turnaround Project, pairing day-to-day program leadership with independent verification and validation (IV&V) of the deliverables produced across performance reviews, systems integration, planning, and delivery.
The challenge
CWD's leadership needed to stabilize core customer service functions quickly while diagnosing problems that touched nearly every part of the operation at once:
- Incomplete and ineffective operating procedures and processes across meter reading, billing, and collections.
- A non-optimal organization structure, with gaps in staffing, skills, and training in customer-facing business areas.
- No consistent daily, weekly, or monthly performance metrics to manage the business by.
- Large, growing backlogs — pended bills, suppressed bills, and unresolved field orders — that obscured the true state of operations.
- Competing IT and systems initiatives, including an ongoing Automated Meter Reading (AMR) rollout, drawing on the same limited resources needed for stabilization.
Scope of the engagement
The engagement required more than a conventional operations review. tieBridge's program management team worked across six interdependent business areas — Customer Care, Billing, Meter Reading, Meter Operations, Collections, and IT — evaluating not only whether individual fixes were technically sound, but whether the underlying processes, staffing, training, and controls were in place to sustain them.
Program management responsibilities included coordinating and prioritizing competing initiatives (the CC&B stabilization effort, the AMR project, and a multi-jurisdiction rate change affecting eight partner agencies), tracking resolution of technical and data issues, and structuring Phase 1 around a clear objective: stop the immediate operational bleeding before pursuing longer-term system enhancements.
Our approach
tieBridge combined root-cause analysis and independent scoring to keep the turnaround honest and on schedule. The effort traced a persistent handheld-device "double-beep" warning to a software flaw rather than failed meters, closed out nearly 10,000 unresolved field activities, and cross-referenced billing records against vacant-property data to identify 4,800 vacant lots and 2,500 unoccupied properties generating uncollectable charges. In all, Phase 1 resolved 73 technical, systems, and data issues, improved 54 operating procedures, and produced a prioritized list of 145 additional improvements for Phase 2 — evidence the underlying problems were pervasive rather than the product of any single failure.
Rebuilding the call center around real metrics
Before June 2011, CWD's call centers had no consistent, industry-standard service targets. tieBridge helped stand up new metrics — 80% of calls answered within 30 seconds and an abandonment rate below 5% — consolidated all call centers under a single manager, and supported cross-training so representatives could handle Customer Service, Pay, and Collections queues interchangeably. Weekly tracking of the 5-day moving average let the team catch and explain performance dips, such as a fourth-quarter decline tied directly to a surge in customers calling to make payments, rather than treating every fluctuation as a new crisis.
Recommendations and structural reforms
Phase 1 closed with a defined, prioritized path into Phase 2 rather than a general call for "more work." Representative priorities carried forward included completing remaining system and data-integrity fixes, resolving the root causes behind invalid field activities so backlogs could not simply re-accumulate, automating active collections and integrating the CC&B billing system with the Ellipse work-management system, completing mandatory infrastructure projects without disrupting stabilization gains, and formally adopting Phase 1 process improvements as standard operations.
Sustained oversight
tieBridge's engagement did not end with the Phase 1 implementation. The program management and IV&V team carried the same disciplined cadence — weekly operational metrics, root-cause tracking, and independent scoring — into Phase 2, monitoring completion of the 145 prioritized improvements. The tieBridge team was also engaged to review the CWD IT organization, which led to the establishment of the CIO office and a completely new organization structure around the priority functions defined by the realignment.
Impact
- Gave the Cleveland City Mayoral Office an independently verified, before-and-after account of operational improvement across all six CWD business areas, rather than a self-reported status update.
- Helped drive the annual collections rate from a 2009 low of 88.3% back to 97.9%, while reducing suppressed bills from 1,923 in mid-August 2011 to 194 by early November.
- Converted a backlog of nearly 10,000 unresolved field activities and 23,000 unnecessary meter investigations into a cleared, current workload.
- Established a weekly, metrics-driven management rhythm that gave CWD leadership a consistent, forward-looking view of operations.
- Set up Phase 2 with a clear, prioritized backlog of 145 improvements and a defined completion timeline.