City of Virginia Beach - VBePay
Business Case
The City of Virginia Beach mission statement is that it exists to enhance the economic, educational, social, and physical quality of the community and provide sustainable municipal services which are valued by its citizens. The Treasurer's Office wanted to improve their citizen experience with the City by launching the new VBePay Online Payment Portal. Prior to launching the service, hard and soft costs for creating, updating and processing bills, and collecting payments demonstrated the need for an automated web-based solution to streamline the existing manual processes. The City of Virginia Beach decided it would implement the service in a phased rollout starting with personal property taxes, followed by real estate tax payments and parking ticket payments.Solution
The Virginia Beach Treasurer's Office and Virginia Interactive teamed up to launch the new VBePay Online Payment Portal. The new, mobile friendly bill presentment and payment solution simplifies the user experience by enabling secure payment and tracking of various types of bills online, 24/7, and email notification when bills are available for viewing. The build of the front-end application also integrates with the Bank of America's services for processing the payment.Other features include:
- Ability to create a secure user account for facilitating future transactions
- Enrollment for email notifications and e-billing
- View billing and payment history for each account
- Enable users to update billing address and phone number
- One-time payments for citizens choosing not to establish a user account
- Shopping cart functionality - customers have ability to pay multiple bills in a single transaction
- Secure, credit card and e-check payment options
- Robust administrative and reporting tools for the City
The Portal is designed to keep pace with changing social habits, shifting demographics, evolving citizen demands and emerging technologies. The service is scalable, and the City is planning to add additional payment types and new enhancements in the near future.
Results
- Solution experienced a quick adoption rate, with over 1,600 users signing up within the first 30 days.
- Over 82,000 registered users are currently using the solution to make payments for Personal Property Taxes, Real Estate Taxes, and Parking Tickets.
- Over $144,000,000 has been processed since the launch of the application in 2014.
- There has been a significant reduction in customer service calls since the application launched. This reduction is a direct result of the intuitive user interface.