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What's on the horizon for utility customer service? Three experts share their thoughts.

Dynamic pricing is the challenge

The requirements for billing and charging systems are becoming more challenging. They will increasingly have to support dynamic pricing models, including time-of-use pricing, and be able to rate and bill usage for a specific period or on an event-driven basis. Dynamic pricing will also have to evolve to include real-time pricing schemes such as peak time rebates and critical peak pricing, as well as market-based pricing feeds. This means incorporating and leveraging interval data generated by smart meters in a timely and consumer-oriented fashion.
There will be further billing complexities as programmes such as the Green Deal are rolled out, and as utilities seize on smart opportunities to expand their product and service offerings into new areas such as home energy management, including in-home display sales, installation and servicing. Billing systems will need to be adaptable to reflect these changing needs. The flexibility will have to extend beyond the back office to provide a much more granular level of detail to enable the provisioning of personalised services and better management of critical peak demand.
The introduction of these competitive and revenue-enhancing changes shouldn’t stop at the rollout of new systems. Utilities need to look beyond the technology and consider how their business processes need to adapt to increased proactive communication with the customer. Dynamic pricing is the future of customer management and engagement in the utility industry.
Andy Corkhill, head of utilities Europe, Middle East and Africa, Convergys Smart Revenue Solutions.

Forget Facebook, there’s virtue in voice
If their supply has failed, or they are baffled by a bill, people don’t want to send an email or navigate through a complex website or automated phone system. They want to speak to another human being who can empathise with their plight and get the problem resolved as quickly as possible. That is why voice needs to be at the centre of utility retailers’ customer service strategies, now and into the future.
Instant improvements in customer engagement can be made by offering functions such as automatically routing a customer’s call to the operator they have spoken with before, even to their mobile phones if necessary. This personalises the experience for the customer, and it also prevents information being duplicated. Outbound calls can similarly be set up to deliver customised messages for the callers, even down to playing their favourite hold music.
Typically, a call management system will be needed to customise, prioritise and re-route calls to relevant employees. Such a system can also be used to populate the company’s customer relation ship management system with valuable data, including activity details and history tables, containing call logs and a secure web link to call recordings for tagging, searching and archiving.
This may seem like an expensive option, but cloud technology can make it simple and cost effective to implement. Plus, the cloud automatically provides security, scalability, stability and in-built disaster recovery services. Indeed, such solutions soon pay for themselves through increased business efficiency.
For instance, the system can recognise when a customer hasn’t paid a bill, by associating the telephone number with account information, and can automatically route the call to the payments department before other customer service help is provided. Opportunities to integrate call information with account information in such a way will become even greater once smart meters are rolled out.
Utilities need to forget email, Twitter and Facebook, and recognise the value of talking and listening to customers. Nothing can replace speaking to another human being and building a relationship through regular conversation. This allows businesses to deliver a personalised service, providing empathy and fast resolution, resulting in happy and loyal customers.
Neil Hammerton, chief executive, Natterbox

Give them want they want – however they want it
Customer satisfaction invariably results from getting it right first time for each and every customer interaction. This means quickly determining the reason for contact and then resolving that query or issue with the most appropriate resource – whether that’s a call centre agent, interactive voice response (IVR) system, webchat or SMS.
Utilities have a wealth of data that is unused. Using this data intelligently to demonstrate – at the time of the contact – knowledge of the issue customers are calling about can drive right first time satisfaction and reduce a significant number of costly unwanted contacts. Utilities must learn to craft their use of technology to use data in an engaging – not imposing – way that callers are comfortable with.
This is founded upon understanding how customers want to be treated then mapping those measures of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) on to utility processes and behaviours, while keeping an eye on cost-effectiveness. For example, data gathered when a customer complains should be bedded within technology for proactive messaging (IVR or SMS) for updates on status.
Proactive communication demonstrates ownership of an issue. For example, proactive text messaging around outages can reassure consumers that the utility is doing everything to restore service as quickly as possible, while saving the call centre from being swamped.
Technology will never fully eliminate the demand for personal contact, but in many cases it can reduce the number of contacts that require human intervention, as well as offering choice and convenience for the customer. The onus is on the provider to put channel choice in the hands of the customer. If automation cannot solve the problem, then it is necessary to make an agent available as quickly as possible or to guarantee a callback.
Looking further ahead, utilities must adapt to changing customer expectations to future-proof their investment in customer services. For example, why should a customer have to change their address with every service provider they use? Consider a utility that takes a change of address and offers to distribute it to all other services: satellite television, electricity, gas and so on. This kind of consolidation is already happening in the US, with great success. Other foreseeable future developments include smart phones coming into their own on the back of smart meters, allowing customers to monitor usage and maintain control of household systems. And the prevalence of service in the cloud allowing utilities to scale to their customer demands easily and cost-effectively.
As the bar is raised on customer service in the utility sector, it will no longer be about call centres, whether onshore or offshore. It is about convenience: the convenience for customers to communicate with their provider via the channel of their choice; the convenience to switch channels effortlessly without having to repeat the same information; and the convenience to solve problems at a touch of a button.
Wally Brill, senior vice president of strategic consulting, VoxGen

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 24 February 2012.
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