Expertflow

Contact Centers for Utility Companies Contact centers for Utilities (Oil, Gas, Water, Electricity etc) have certain requirements and a background that is different in some respects to other contact centers. Customer care in utility companies The first Cisco contact centers deployed in Europe where Expertflow staff was involved were for utility companies, electricity companies in Switzerland in particular: www.ccenergie.ch ; http://www.bkwfmb.ch/bkwfmb/en/home.html , http://www.romande-energie.ch , and then later http://www.southernwater.co.uk/

With the liberalization of the electricity market, more sophisticated product packages (green energy, electricity bundled with broadband internet, guaranteed SLA/ power availability,...) were introduced. Even with new product packages, the main differentiator was no longer the product,  but customer service. Customer care, and with that a customer care center, became  a core asset of utility companies.

Customer care not only allows utility companies to provide better and consistent customer service. They also streamline and automate certain processes, such as product activation, invoicing, billing, claims management, house moves. They allow the utility companies to serve their customers at a lower cost and to management the cash flow of the utility company.

A Utility service provider serves a wide range of customers with very different requirements - take for example heavy industry that requires large amounts of energy, telecom/ IT companies that require reliable energy, households that require inexpensive energy. It becomes vital for a utility provider to be able to discriminate between these customer requirements using different products and prices. A fantastic reliable power supply that would be sufficient for an IT company might result in too large costs for a household, and a lower-cost less reliable network might be not sufficient for an IT company. Being able to discriminate/ differentiate between customers will allow the utility to serve each customer with the right product and price.

Expertflow

Expertflow can provide a turn-key customer care platform, starting with a CRM solution to the call and contact center, including a voice self service platform.

Voice Selfservice in Utility companies

IVR voice self service solutions provided by utility companies include the following:

• Providing product information
• Automatic meter reading (gaz, electricity, water etc) instead of internet read-out and integration with SAP-IS-U, for example
• Activation of services
• Automatic announcements of outages and emergencies. Customers calling from a certain region where an outage occurred could for example automatically be informed of an outage and the expected status, or outbound calls to enterprise customers could provide automatic updates.
• Remote personnel of the Utility company can receive an outbound call automatically from the IVR system reading out via Text-to-speech the issue of the outage, and this personnel can then immediately become available as inbound contact center agent – on their mobile phone!
• Queries for Invoices and Account information
• Control of payments

These voice self services can be guided by Automatic Speech Recognition, localized to the local language to further improve the customer friendliness of the voice portal.

Typical IT environment in Utilities

Historically for utility companies, the most frequently found ERP solution is SAP, and the most frequent voice recording solution is ASC. Expertflow and Cisco can address this technical environment and offer a turn-key solution and a smooth migration based on the following:

• Cisco UCCE is a telephony independent solution. For larger deployments (more than 100 agents), it is financially viable to keep the existing telephony platform and use Cisco UCCE as a contact center/ IVR platform only. The customer keeps a full independence of the telephony, the contact center platform, the IVR and the ERP solution (frequently SAP). While these components are strongly integrated, a customer could always choose to change either component without impacting the others.
• Expertflow has a full Multimedia connector between Cisco UCCE and SAP, that takes advantage of SAP’s Email Management and Chat capabilities, while also managing the Outbound part.
• Expertflow is certified in the ASC voice recording solution and can migrate it to new features and capabilities, such as adding Quality management or CTI integration

Example installations that use the SAP-UCCE connector, the first deployments of which took place back in 2001: