Board of Public Utilities: Board Meeting (Oct. 7, 2026)

By Daniel Allen, Kansas City Documenter

See more about this meeting at Documenters.org

These notes were produced through Kansas City Documenters, which trains and pays community members to take fact-checked notes at public meetings, strengthening transparency and accountability in local government.

Summary

• The BPU’s new Interactive Voice Response system, which had handled approximately 130,000 calls so far this year, is allowing staff to monitor where calls are routed.
• A new “guest pay” option allows family, friends, caregivers or others to help a customer make a payment without needing to log in to the customer’s account.
• Staff is working on a “transformative” change that will make initiating service much easier.

Notes 

General Manager / Team Reports

• Gabriela Freeman, director of customer care, provided an update as part of Customer Service Week. She said:
  • Recent actions include
    • Looking closely over the past year at where customers encounter friction, such as unclear steps on how to reach the BPU.
    • Focusing on enhancing how customers interact with the BPU across their most common touchpoints. This includes paying bills, starting or transferring services or reaching out for help. “These are moments when customers expect clarity and convenience,” she said. “We’re examining each of these journeys end to end to identify where issues occur, and then use modernizing tools to make the experience more user friendly.”
    • Reviewing surveys, call center insights and feedback from frontline staff to guide improvements.
  • Data she provided from January through Sept. 30 included:
    • Customer care agents handled approximately 54,000 calls.
    • The new automated call system is taking pressure off of customer care agents. It handled 130,000 calls and gives the BPU the ability to to track call routing. Of the calls handled, 23,000 were sent to the automated payment line; 9,000 were sent to make payment arrangements and 13,530 calls were transferred to the outage line.
    • Assisted 778 households with $96,000 in hardship assistance and $178,000 in utility assistance.
    • From January through June, the BPU translated about 32,000 calls where customers needed real-time language assistance. 
  • To improve service to senior customers, the BPU sent out a survey that received 74 responses, with 24 respondents agreeing to an in-person meeting. Topics in the initial 74 responses covered navigating the website and reading a bill online. The in-depth conversations are scheduled for November.
• Freeman displayed new payment options released in June. New options include check payments by phone, automatic payments by checking account and “guest pay,” where a family member, a caregiver or a neighbor can help someone make a payment without needing to log in or access the customer’s full account.
• A new process to start service is also under development, and is “one of the most transformative changes we’re making to improve the customer experience this year,” Freeman said.
  • Instead of requiring a lot of documentation up front, a new self-validation process is underway and requires no documents. Customers who pass validation will get service started more quickly, reducing wait time and preventing interruption in utility access.
• Freeman said customers had expressed frustration with understanding their monthly bills.
  • In May, a collaboration with J.C. Harmon High School and Wyandotte High School began to conduct a bill survey to help change the existing bill format. Students gathered feedback from the community and learned that customers often had problems reading the circle graphs and their use of colors. BPU worked with Surebill to redesign the bill. Freeman described the new bill redesign. 
• Freeman described a technological innovation in which customers could use a tablet check-in system and a live BPU employee would appear on the screen for assistance. This will mostly benefit customers who enter the building without an appointment.
  • The customer will be presented with a tablet and select their language. A live BPU employee will arrive for assistance and answer questions. Bilingual employees are positioned to assist both English and Spanish speakers. If a customer has more complex issues, the customer will be directed to a different department for resolution. Freeman said the tablet will include a personal touch that customers missed while maintaining a new service model.

Public Comments

• A resident of the Rosehill subdivision in Kansas City, Kansas, expressed frustration that some people still had no power following the previous storm that caused damage throughout the city. He said there was too much focus on water maintenance and not enough on electrical. He was renovating a house where a distribution line is buried, which prevents power loss. The BPU continues to trim trees, but that is not a permanent solution to electrical outages. If customers had those lines from the pole to the house underground, then fewer families would have been without power from the storm. If work can be done for adequate water maintenance, then it should also be done for electrical, he said. 

Observations & Follow-Up Questions

• What would the employee response be to extending hours for the new tablet system?
• How are customers responding to the automated call system instead of talking to a customer care agent?
• Is it feasible for the BPU to bury power lines?

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