Innovation Is a Core Principle
Making Life Easy with Smarthub
Life is hectic. I get it. There’s always something else to add to the to-do list! In the hustle and bustle of life, who wouldn’t appreciate a bit more convenience? Here at Union Rural Electric (URE), we know that your time is valuable, and we want to be there with convenient offerings when you need us.
Lately, my messages have focused on rate studies, financial forecasts, and other tools we use to manage the business of your cooperative. We’re also using continuous improvement principles as we look for ways to improve our systems — both internal and those we use when working with members like you.
In June, we worked with the team at National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC), our business software provider. With their help, we were able to quickly make a few simple improvements to how we use their software in our day-to-day work. We also found a couple of more significant improvements in how we notify members of events.
Using SmartHub, which is our web payment platform and mobile app, members already have the option to receive emails and/or text messages for notifications such as outage alerts, outage restoration, and when your monthly bill is ready to be viewed. We also use SmartHub to supplement our annual meeting invitations and to run the annual meeting video contest.
You can also use your SmartHub account to take part in our “enter to win” contests. URE is a community event sponsor for many local events, and we purchase tickets to give away to our members. Last month, members had a chance to win All Ohio Balloonfest tickets!
Many of our members already use SmartHub to keep up to date. But we are always looking to improve the available services within SmartHub. I also want to be clear that we understand the value of your attention, so we would never want to jeopardize it by needlessly overusing the notifications. You always have control over which types of notifications you receive.
Looking to the future, we will be exploring opportunities to notify participating SmartHub members of activities in their accounts, such as account/service transfers, autopay draft date reminders, approaching credit card expiration dates, and permanent service activations. The goal of these new features is to make getting information from URE just a little easier.
We have always promoted SmartHub’s convenient payment, service request, and usage monitoring features. And don’t forget that you can sign up for paperless billing in SmartHub — a service that is not only good for the environment but also helps us to keep costs down. As an ongoing thank-you to our paperless billed members, we are planning a monthly drawing in SmartHub for two $25 billing credits.
So, here’s another to-do item: Make sure to log in to SmartHub at ure.com/smarthub and sign up for paperless billing.
If you have any questions, you can still call our friendly member service representatives at (937) 642-1826, or email URE. We want to be easy to reach, and we want you to be able to easily access the information you need, because we’re your electric cooperative.