SUMMARY

Responsible for establishing, managing and enhancing relationships with strategic business customers, and segments who are complex users of energy and water, have a significant impact on the organization and community, and have complex and unique utility service needs. This position includes assuming leadership roles in associations that represent the strategic business accounts or segments and serve as point of contact for understanding segment needs and utility consumption patterns. Incumbents provide solutions to both individual customer issues and coordinate services to meet segment needs as well.

 Incumbents are responsible for complex contract negotiations associated with utility service (e.g., second feed, enhanced power, rate options, unique operational agreements, etc.). They are also responsible for leading and/or contributing to strategic and departmental continuous improvement projects, programs, and services.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES The following duties and responsibilities are illustrative of the primary functions of this position and are not intended to be all inclusive.

• Builds and maintains effective long-term relationships and a high level of satisfaction with key senior-level decision makers and influencers (often face-to-face); represents the organization and customer in a highly professional and confidential manner
• Resolves complex problems requiring customized solutions that frequently involve financial analysis, business and customer risk analysis, legal review, and knowledge of tariffs and regulations as well as technical utility knowledge
• Meets with customers to identify goals and objectives; develops account plans, including milestones, resource requirements, deliverables, and monitoring processes
• Represents customer goals and objectives to organization stakeholders; identifies applicable standards and policies; determines best solutions for issues not clearly stated within standards and policies
• Educates customers on utility-related issues (e.g., energy, stormwater, wastewater, and water management best practices, energy conservation, renewable options, etc.); assists customers in understanding individual usage patterns and associated costs; responds to customer questions on how industry changes may affect their business and/or operations
• Leads and participates in strategic and departmental continuous improvement initiatives that address policies and processes that impact business customers
• Provides periodic communications to stakeholders on the status of efforts to enable customers to reach goals and objectives
• Coordinates and participates in negotiations between customer and organization in the development of agreements and/or contracts
• Documents key issues as well as decision steps used in determining and implementing resolutions
• It is the responsibility of all employees to comply with the safety and health program in support of an incident and injury free workplace
• May be assigned special projects as project manager 
• Assist with emergency communications for key accounts and large commercial customers identified, as needed; coordinate with other department staff to provide coverage for key accounts emergency needs.
• Coordinate City and Utilities resources for investigating, resolving and responding to key and large commercial customer service issues concerning rates, billing, metering, power and water quality and reliability, facility expansion and modifications.
• Identify and champion development of new customer-focused policies, programs, and strategic opportunities, critical to sustaining progressive and responsible businesses.
• Develop and maintain program reports; track contacts and other activity utilizing account tracking databases; keep Utilities senior management informed of customer issues, successes and items of interest.
• Participate as customer liaison in facility assessments and engage with subject matter experts.
• Establish an online presence for engaging with customers.
• Perform on-call duty that supports quickly and effectively responding to outages with media, website and social media, and being prepared to go to outage site or an emergency operations center, as needed. Performs other related duties as assigned.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

This position may have supervisory responsibilities.