Customer stories
Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority
Serving families through helpful digital strategies
Challenge
Tens of thousands of people in the Easley, South Carolina community rely on just a handful of utilities companies to power their lives. One of those critical groups is Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority (FHNGA), a company founded in 1952 that provides dependable natural gas services to residences, commercial businesses, and organizations in a variety of industries. FHNGA needed a website as reliable as its services. They wanted a one-stop location for its variety of resources - from energy-saving strategies to bill pay to critical public safety information. In short, Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority wanted to reinvent the way its community and customers understood city services.Most importantly, FHNGA needed a secure customer portal to facilitate bill pay and accounts management without the fear of compromised information. They wanted to leave a positive impression on users and minimize the occasional frustration associated with utilizes companies.
Solution
Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority needed a partner who understood the importance of safety, security, and doing whatever it takes to keep the power going. The legacy business wanted create an easily accessible website that streamlined how customers searched for and accessed the critical information they needed. To meet these challenges, FHNGA turned to Solodev to bring a comprehensive approach from design to development.
A fast, secure, scalable and reliable infrastructure was the first essential piece to Fort Hill’s success in the development and launch of their new website. The Solodev CMS web experience platform gave the website a streamlined interface that can reduce the clutter associated with traditional websites and improve speed. Solodev also built FHNGA to dynamically respond to different devices, from smartphone and tablet to desktop.
Additionally, the website needed to replicate Fort Hill’s customer-first mentality, and so the company’s online elements received a major design overhaul to optimize user experience (UX) and keep its customers at the center of what it does. Solodev worked with FHNGA to streamline common actions done on their website. The two groups partnered together to develop a unique ‘Contact Us’ form. The new module allowed for a simpler, easier alternative to the organization’s outdated login experience. They also implemented a secure and streamlined login process for customers, and supported account information through a multi-layered customer page.
To optimize their hosting capabilities, FHNGA harnessed the power of the AWS Cloud by leveraging Solodev’s status as an Amazon Web Services Partner. This exposed FHNGA’s website to a breadth of opportunities available through cloud hosting. Solodev utilized AWS CloudFront, an extremely powerful CDN that drastically increased the delivery speed of FHNGA’s website. Additionally, Solodev utilized Amazon RDS to set up, operate, and scale relational databases (MySQL) for Fort Hill in the cloud in conjunction with AWS CloudFront. The utilities company also tapped into the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to have the ability to quickly auto-scale capacity to serve instances of sudden heavy loads without worrying about a crash. FHNGA can rest easy in best-of-breed security provided by AWS services by the increased privacy and control network access with network firewalls built into Amazon.
Result
The Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority website serves multiple markets in both the residential and business sectors with ease and a peace of mind they didn’t have before. Thanks to the security found within the AWS services, customers can safely pay bills online. The website has become an extension of Fort Hill Natural Gas Authority’s goal to provide dependable natural gas services to the community of upstate South Carolina by offering an equally reliable online resource. Additionally, FHNGA and Solodev has proven a dependable partnership; the utilities company has worked with Solodev for over a decade. Throughout that decade, Solodev and FHNGA committed to continually innovating improvements to the website.