Excellence and efficiency achieve in utilities customer service

Open Text helps simultaneously to cut costs and improve service.

The utilities customer service dilemma is clear.  Customers and regulators want ever better customer service; regulators may also demand service pledges and reported KPIs.  Stockholders seek increasing returns yet competition and regulation constrain prices.  So, it’s “costs versus quality”.

Or is it?  We can show that an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) enabled strategic approach to information management can support business improvement in both directions.  For Open Text utilities customers, it already does.

Better information management is key; but often also a major challenge:

•    Customer-related information comes from multiple sources – customers, billing systems, credit checks, related contractors
•    Many information types occur – bills, correspondence, meter readings, orders, contracts and more, and in diverse electronic file types and - still –  paper
•    They’re originated, processed, viewed and re-used by employees in diverse systems that may not “talk” to each other and paper files that don’t “talk” at all
•    Time and money are lost trying to find, process and use information – putting consistent high customer service at risk

So, an Information Management “recipe” might be:

•    Unite diverse information in a structure and context that suits all users
•    Make it appropriately accessible through the system of users choice
•    Move it quickly, securely and assuredly through the organisation and its life cycle.
•    Support modern multi-channel customer service.

Open Text customers have achieved much and seek to achieve much more in these areas.  Let’s see how.

Several major utilities use Open Text extensively to both support and complement its commitment to SAP.  For example in one case there was an early decision to adopt the Open Text Archive product for its SAP data.  By extracting and archiving information from SAP the utility reduces IT costs and also maintains strong performance levels for the customer service aspects of its SAP instance.

An early candidate for further archiving was billing records, with 300,000 invoices per day put into the archive but yet made available for customer service operatives needing access to this information. Efficient customer relationship management was maintained by not needing to leave their SAP interface, enabling fast response to customer calls.

The next logical step was to unite customer-related information from other sources into a single “customer folder” for each customer, approaching the “360 degree” view of the customer, via Open Text Doculink, still enabling employees to access all the information via the SAP interface; delivering both better (faster) customer service and more efficient, lower cost response to customer queries. 

Of course, it’s widely accepted now that web-based self-service, obviously much cheaper than employee-assisted service, can also be better service – available 24-hours with no call queue waiting.  So this utility then used Open Text to render all customer bills, or invoices, into the archive.  Customers can then view their own bill without at any time directly accessing the company’s SAP instance; result, great service, low cost, high security, high SAP performance.

A major European utility, with operations in more than one of the EU’s top 5 economies, sees benefits to e-billing beyond service improvement and potential print/postage savings.  Customers who opt for e-billing cannot dispute the availability of the invoice and hence delay payment, as some have historically done with postal billing.  So the number of such calls to the call centre can be reduced, saving money; cash collection delays for such accounts can also be reduced, and the need to produce duplicate bills out of the main billing run can also be avoided.  Thus, many such incidents, costing tens of Euros each to resolve, can be avoided.

Of course, though SAP’s utilities footprint is large and expanding, not all utilities use SAP.  One water utility company nonetheless chose to handle customer correspondence with an Open Text workflow solution that ingested, routed and tracked customer correspondence.  With these methods, not only is correspondence handled faster, it can be dealt with more consistently with ready replies for common issues – and the regulatory demand for both consistent performance standards and reported compliance to these can also be satisfied  without major, discrete, reporting activity.

Naturally correspondence can arrive in a number of forms, including paper.  This brings into play the notion of scanning and routing paper material into electronic form, accessible wherever needed very soon after it’s arrival – very different from the days of routed paper.  Another utility brings yet further power to the billing area, scanning in meter readings recorded on paper and making them rapidly available at the contact centre, adding more confidence there to resolve billing queries and reducing the need for expensive follow-up and hence collection delays.

Utilities are now identifying more and more opportunities for improved customer service, some of which are not restricted to the contact centre or billing operations.  A web-based “bulletin board” for significant service outages, it is thought, can both keep customers fully informed and reduce inbound calls to the contact centre.  Fully up-to-date and accurate asset management documentation – a major focus area for some customers – can help ensure engineers are well-informed when they go to site, reducing the incidents of failed site visits and hence delayed service restoration.

We have shown that, with Open Text ECM deployed in multiple business applications, service improvement and cost reduction can advance together from the same project, rather than being seen as conflicting objectives.  Open Text is a global player in driving efficiencies in utility organizations in Australia, USA and Canada. Around half of Europe’s top 80 utilities are already Open Text customers, but much remains to be done, according to Adrian Butcher, Director of Value Engineering for Open Text EMEA:  “When we add together what our customers are doing in utilities, in customer service and elsewhere, we can assemble a true enterprise value proposition that few if any individual organisations have yet realised. Since these applications are tried and tested in the field, we know they are achievable.  We hope to work more with new and existing customers in the Utilities sector to enhance their value to customers and stockholders alike”.