A bungled switch to a new computer system that showed huge balances due and left millions of ComEd customers unable to pay their bills online for more than a week is fixed, the utility said Wednesday.
Scheduled to take place over Presidents Day weekend, the new customer information system was supposed to be up and running Monday, Feb. 19. Instead, the data for ComEd’s 4 million customers, including billing information, was essentially inaccessible on the new platform.
“When we switched everything live on Monday, there were still some issues with having a lot of these platforms talk to each other,” Tom Dominguez, a ComEd spokesperson, said Wednesday. “The bottom line was, we lost a lot of that functionality for a couple of days.”
Full functionality was restored Saturday — nine days after the system was shut down for the transfer, Dominguez said.
The snafu not only prevented ComEd customers from paying their bills online, it also messed up the pay-by-phone automated feature.
When customers tried to pay by phone, they were told their balance was $9,999.99. Fortunately, that automated bill pay option was also not working, Dominguez said.
“Folks were phoning in and checking their balance and finding out that they were defaulting to a balance that had a bunch of nines in it,” he said. “But then they weren’t able to get in and pay their bills.”
Other than a traditional check, the only way ComEd customers could pay their bills during the system outage was through a live phone operator, Dominguez said.
The new computer system was designed to provide better customer service by connecting a variety of ComEd programs together onto one screen, Dominguez said. But the enormous amount of data on its customers didn’t transfer automatically, forcing the utility to move it over manually.
The time-consuming process took five extra days to complete, Dominguez said.
For customers that were unable to pay their bills during the system outage, ComEd is extending its grace period to cover the down time.
“They will not get any late charges, they will not be disconnected because of this,” Dominguez said.
In December, the Illinois Commerce Commission rejected ComEd’s four-year grid improvement plan and slashed its proposed $1.47 billion rate increase, giving the utility three months to come back with a revised plan.
The proposed rate increase would have hiked the average delivery charges for ComEd customers by $17 per month beginning in January.
rchannick@chicagotribune.com
