Heidi Frazier is a dedicated Service Delivery Manager at MuniBilling, consistently delivering outstanding results for our managed service clients. With her exceptional communication and organizational skills, she ensures that our clients receive top-notch service and support.
When she’s not managing utility billing, Heidi enjoys spending time outdoors. She is an avid hiker and loves exploring new trails and scenic routes. Additionally, Heidi is a passionate pickleball player and enjoys playing matches with friends.
Q: Thanks for the time today, Heidi! I’d love to start with your favorite part of running Utility Billing Operations for so many diverse organizations.
Good morning! I would say my favorite part of running Utility Billing Operations for so many diverse organizations is just helping to create value for our clients. We don’t see many organizations that do what we do in this space, and not to brag, but we excel at establishing processes and workflows, which there aren’t many providers that do that kind of work in this space.
I love how our process helps identify the current business process and then determine how best to perform those steps to improve efficiency. When we reduce time and strain for our clients, we actively contribute to their success, which creates value and helps to make a real difference in different communities.
Q: On the surface, it’s understandably a little unnerving to relent control of some parts of the business, but that can open a lot of capacity for some seriously overworked teams.
What are some recent ways you have seen capacity increase for those organizations that have outsourced to MuniBilling successfully?
Turnover continually proves to be a significant hurdle for many our clients. Staff members are retiring, going on parental leave, or just looking for a different career path. That makes finding dedicated long-term workers today more difficult than ever.
Having an organization like MuniBilling as part of your expanded team helps to alleviate the challenges of transitioning knowledge while maintaining the billing process with minimal disruption to customers.
Since we not only learn your specific business rules but document the processes along the way, we can handle billing just as an internal team member would and helps to establish that long-term confidence.
That means that organizations who view the relationship in a total cost of ownership mindset are offloading the burden of recruitment, hiring, benefits, Human Resources costs, and training while getting at least the same results, if not something a little better.
Q: What is your process for starting to work with new clients, and what could potential clients do to set themselves up for success coming on board with an outsourced billing team?
It sounds really simple, but one essential component for beginning to work with the Managed Services team is just to clearly identify what operations our clients want to continue managing in-house versus what they'll be passing off to the MuniBilling team.
Each client is different and has specific needs, not to mention that some team members, understandably, want to keep components of the billing process in-house and can staff those accordingly. Other organizations may need experts or assistance in just specific areas of the business, like bill printing or call center services.
The beauty of MuniBilling’s approach is that we work with you both during our sales process and post-sale to define where those lines are and help to augment your team, not replace them.
Understanding and defining those roles for all business processes will establish a solid groundwork for full team success and ensure we’re not duplicating efforts.
We’ve seen organizations that come into the arrangement with those clear expectations are the ones that leverage our team to the full extent of their abilities.
Q: Let’s say an organization has been a MuniBilling Managed Services customer for a few years… What are things they could continue to work on to improve better the working process with an outsourced billing team?
I would say that while we are an outsource for our clients, it is beneficial to see MuniBilling Managed Services as more of an extension of your team, not an outside support organization.
The core of our mission is to help organizations operate more efficiently, and we really do mean that.
We’ve gathered an amazing group of process-minded individuals that, at the heart of our work, really focus on improving processes to make things run even better than they currently are.
Organizations that are the most successful use us like an extension of their team. They are the ones who are open and collaborative on the process and how to improve it and are open to hearing our input and advice.
We have such a unique viewpoint to identify trends and operational best practices based on our nationwide footprint.
Organizations that really leverage that thought leadership are typically the ones that can hit their operational goals, whether that is controlling expenses, determining your rate of exposure, operational improvements, or even intelligent rate management.
How organizations perceive the relationship establishes the communication and allows us to work together as one team aligned to the same goal. When there is good communication and a platform for honest feedback, that is where the space for continuous improvement lives.
