Electricity Bill Enquiry via SMS

Knowing how much your electricity bill can be a tedious task. You have to travel to the nearest ESCOM branch and stand on the enquires queue - a queue that can get really long when there have been some disconnections due to unpaid bills. But the Electricity Supply Commission of Malawi, (website under construction) ESCOM, has been making efforts to make this easier. They started delivering the bill info straight to the house, when they come to record metre readings, to avoid excuses about wrong postal addresses and such excuses.

It seems that they also started working on an online bill enquiry service through their website (thanks to Austin Madinga for announcing this at ITMalawi discussion group (message #4151)). But this is still work-in-progress since 2004.

But ESCOM has made much progress using another technology: SMS! This is a much better technology for this purpose considering that more of its clients have access to mobile phones than the web.

ESCOM has introduced a service that lets its customers know how much they need to pay the power utility company by "texting" or rather sending an SMS message to 08 900 500.

All you have to do is create a new SMS message, write your ESCOM account number and send the message to 08 900 500. In a few seconds, you get to know how much you owe the electricity provider.

The service costs the equivalent of a normal SMS message by your network operator; much much cheaper than to travel and queue at your nearest ESCOM branch. I'm sure you can also check the balance from outside Malawi by sending to +265 8 900 500.

Here is what I got on 6th Sept 2006 (I've replaced my land lord's name with mine):

YOUR ELECTRICITY BILL (MR S. MUMBA) IS NOW: K-23.23. Thank you for keeping your account up to date.<ESCOM-LAST UPDATE: 04/09/06/17:02>
From: +2658900500 11:16am 6-SEP-06

For very obvious reasons, I don't know what it says when you haven't paid for several months :)

But, like any other system, it still has some room for improvements.

Firstly, the bill information is not real time. The "ESCOM-LAST UPDATE" time shows how current the bill information you have received, is. When I asked ESCOM, they said the information is updated daily. I'm not sure if travelling to the nearest ESCOM branch would give you more current information than that or not. Daily updates should be adequate for most users if ESCOM keeps its word.

Another issue is that you can check your bill from any mobile phone number. When they say "...anytime... anywhere"; they really mean it! That's a great feature of the service but it also means that if you guess the right account number, you can check that VIP's ESCOM account balance, especially when they're refuting media allegations about their huge unpaid bills (Don't try this at home). Including the customer name confirms that you´re checking the right account but I feel replacing the Customer Name with the Account Number would give that assurance too without giving unnecessary information.

Otherwise, I'm glad to see ESCOM literally bringing information at the phone users' finger tips!

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malawi, sms, phone, electricity