We are very pleased to share this detail with you. It is an almost perfect case study for a North American residential secure 'PUSH' email bill presentment project.

Whitby Hydro has no internet based ebilling system and had no email addresses in November of 2005. Through dedicated email address gathering, and the Striata secure email billing strategies, Whitby recently went live with just over 3% adoption. (A percentage that most North American utilities have taken up to two years to achieve.)

1. Project Goals
   • Paper turn off
   • Instant bill delivery
   • Electronic payments
   • Improved reporting / bill usage visibility
   • Personalized marketing channel
   • Better customer service
   • Reduced DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)
   • Corporate customer convenience (data file inclusion)
   • Reduced cost & improved customer service



2. Timing
   • Exactly 16 weeks from signature to go live (Including the Christmas holidays)
   • Project approval: 25th November 2005
   • Implementation & email address gathering: 7th December 2005
   • Introductory emails: 15th March 2006
   • eBilling go live: 23rd March 2006



3. Project Details
   • 'PUSH' email billing
   • Fully personalized
   • Securely encrypted PDF
   • Offline 'shared secret' = postal code
   • Easy 'Perfect Print' functionality
   • Embedded data file
   • Payment links to the top 8 Canadian banks
   • Multiple bills in a single email. (Where applicable)
   • Bill stuffers
   • Regulatory & other Whitby information
   • Replies monitored by CSR's
   • PAPER AUTOMATICALLY TURNED OFF (Opt-out.)
   • ASP model
   • Striata Data Centre in Dallas, TX
   • Daily secure billing data transfer
   • Two email templates
   • Nine bill types
   • Residential & commercial
   • Striata Deliverability Services



4. Go-live Statistics
   • 3% adoption at go live.
   • It's still too early for completely representative numbers, but initial reporting is showing:
     • Between 80% and 90% of all email bills are opened within one business day of being sent.
     • Deliverability is over 95%.
     • Unsubscription / opt-out is currently less than 0.005%.
     • Paper turn off is over 95%.



5. Reporting
   • When the email was sent
   • When it was delivered
   • Any that were undeliverable
   • When the email was opened, how many times & when
   • Links clicked on in the body of the email
   • Links clicked on within the securely encrypted PDF
   • Any replies
   • New subscriptions
   • Unsubscriptions



6. Focus Areas Going Forward
   • Email address gathering!!!
   • Quickly & accurately actioning any email replies
   • Smooth paper delivery for undeliverable emails
   • Undeliverable email cleaning



7. Future Functionality
   • Payment directly from within the secure email bill
   • Advanced personalized marketing
   • 'In-email' customer satisfaction survey
   • Outage notifications

Please do not hesitate to contact us for additional details on this project.

Striata & Whitby Hydro will be jointly presenting this case study at the Billing / CIS America conference in Atlanta on 26th April.

For more information, contact Ashley Baptiste at conferences@verizon.net or online: http://www.spintelligent-events.com/mam2006/en/

We hope to see you there.