Kenya Power on track to digitising payments by early 2015

A year after announcing the gradual phasing out of paper bills, Kenya Power has so far put 40 per cent of its customers on electronic meters — setting the stage for the nationwide unveiling of the service by early 2015.

The national electricity distributor is hoping that doing away with paper bills will help it cut costs and improve customer service.

Ben Chumo, the Kenya Power chief executive, said registration of customers on the electronic platform was on-going.

“We hope to finish collecting data by the end of this year because our target is phasing out of paper bills by the beginning of next year,” said Dr Chumo in a telephone interview with the Business Daily.

“We will be sending bills via email and Short Message Services (SMS),” he said. The utility firm’s customer base currently stands at three million, of which 700,000 are connected via prepaid meters while 2.3 million are on the older postpaid metering system.

The postage fee for sending a single paper bill to a customer is Sh35, meaning that the utility company used to spend Sh73.9 million per month (Sh887.9 million annually) on the service alone.

The new digital service will see Kenya Power not only save on the cost incurred in mailing over two million bills monthly, but also on other related expenses including buying paper and printing the bills as well as labour costs.

“The huge savings we will make will allow us to plough the money to improve the grid, translating into cost savings for our shareholders,” said Dr Chumo.

“Besides, we want Kenyans to do more meaningful work than queuing to pay bills because electronic bills make Kenyans’ lives easier,” he added.

Unregistered customers

Kenya Power is now intensifying a campaign to capture the records of the remaining unregistered customers’ account details.

Customers can register onto the system either through their mobile phones, by sending an email to the utility firm’s customer service section or by filling a form on the company’s website and submitting it.

The cost for registration is a one-off charge of Sh10 through an SMS, alerts will be sent for free.

The soon-to-be unveiled digital service will also enable Kenya Power to send disconnection alerts for non-payment of bill a day before the actual power interruption.

Besides, the system will also be used to market new service products, alert customers of any expected power outage in their area or an upcoming maintenance service.

Kenya Power hopes that the alerts system will help lower the number of disconnect ions they undertake on a daily basis from the current 20,000 power lines as well as the associated expenses.

Employing digital technology will not only upgrade customer service but will also see the power distributor’s savings injected into meaningful projects, for instance expanding the grid.

The firm plans to increase its customer count by a million by the end of the current financial year.

Kenya Power plans to borrow Sh53 billion in the next seven months to improve its infrastructure, including 36 new substations — investments that could use the extra savings made from digitising billing.

The firm estimates that the annual revenue it incurs on mailing paper bills is enough to set up two sub-stations.

The latest telecommunication statistics show that 32.2 million Kenyans have mobile phones, a key infrastructure for digitising billing at Kenya Power.

Mobile phone acquisition has enabled citizens to embrace technologies like mobile money transfer to access various financial services including buying electricity tokens.