Letter: Liberty Utilities redefines convenience

To the community,

I paid most of my bills online (yesterday), and most companies today make paying online pretty easy, such as Southwest Gas. On the other hand, Liberty Utilities, which has been trying to tell us we need so many new utility lines and are groping for more expenses, charges a $3.50 convenience fee if you want to pay your bill on their website. They should be ashamed.

We should be charging them a “convenience” fee since they don’t have to manually answer the phone, input data, give a confirmation number, etc., when we give them a payment online.

I am not very impressed with Liberty Utilities. Their outage over the Thanksgiving weekend (Friday) on Sierra Boulevard and for miles around, was an unbelievable inconvenience and blamed on their new underground lines on Sierra Boulevard. How did we know this? Not from any information you could get from their non-info recording for sure — only by tracking down a service truck to see what the story was.

Liberty Utilities: get a grip and start learning how to “engage” with your customers, and start by accepting online payments without gouging your customers for “convenience” — which is all your.

Judi and Terry Allen, South Lake Tahoe