by: Roger Warehime, Director, Gas, Water, Energy Management & External Relations
Just over a year ago OPU launched a new website. Along with a nicer appearance and easier navigation, we added the ability to access accounts online. With these changes, you were able to pay your bill and view payment and consumption history.
Over the past year, the number of visits to our site has grown steadily. We are now seeing 2,200 visits from 1,700 unique visitors each month. Approximately 1,200 of our customers have created OPU online accounts, accounting for roughly 10% of our customer base. We now receive just under 1,000 payments online each month, which accounts for 8% of the payments we receive.
This month OPU is happy to roll out the next phase of our website: Our OPU mobile app. Currently in the United States, 50% of all cell phone owners use a smart phone and a national survey revealed that 25% of adults use their phone rather than a computer to go online. Locally, we’ve noticed that the percentage of visitors to our website that use a mobile device rather than a computer has more than doubled from 7% last year to 15% this year. However, it can be difficult to navigate a website designed for a full screen computer on the small screen of a cell phone. For this reason, companies now offer a separate version of their website (an “app”) which is friendlier to mobile devices.
If you are a smartphone user, please scan the QR code on the front of this newsletter to download our app. We have put the information we think users are most interested in at the top of the app using icon buttons which can easily be selected on a smartphone.
Unfortunately, the web-payment portion of our website is not yet mobile-friendly. Although we realize that this is becoming a primary reason that our customers access our website and that more customers are doing this from mobile devices, we didn’t want to wait in launching the rest of our mobile app until this more complicated piece was finished. Don’t fear—the app for paying by mobile device is coming. But right now, clicking on the icon for payments will take you to the traditional website. You can also always get to the full traditional website from our mobile website by clicking the icon for it on the mobile app.
We hope you like our new mobile app and find it useful. As always, we welcome your feedback!
Traditional Website Viewed from a Smartphone
Mobile App Viewed from a Smartphone