Opinion: smart meters will change the world of customer service

“Smart meters allow us to offer an undreamt of level of customer service.”

The new smart meter connections allow utility companies to better service customers. For example they enable top-up via web, app or interactive voice response – regardless of where the customer is from or what time of the day or night it is. Customers love that element of being in control, whether in terms of how they pay for their energy or how they monitor it.

What this does is give us the flexibility and tools to proactively help customers, rather than being purely reactive, something call centres have traditionally always had an issue with.

Here’s a really good example: not too long ago we at Utilita had a system outage that resulted in us not being able to answer calls – a frustrating situation.

We were mindful that there was a real risk to vulnerable customers who had run out of credit because we may not have been in a position to restore their electric or gas. If they were unable to contact us, how could we know to help them?

But as our smart meters send out an alert when they run out of credit and turn off, we were able to quickly run a report showing all customers who had an issue since the system outage.

We could then send credit directly to the meter to restore their supply. In addition, we were also able to send a message to each customer’s in-home display explaining what we had done – just to reassure them.

This resulted in 95 per cent of affected customers having their supply restored within two hours – before the temperature dropped and night time arrived.

In addition, we were able to cushion the impact on our call centre because customers who would previously have been off-supply were serviced without the need for interaction.

We also use the alerts sent by the meter to drive our call centre.

One thing we do is carry out a “data dip” on incoming calls to link the customer’s numbers to any of ten key alerts sent by the meter, indicating a potentially vulnerable or dangerous situation.

What this does is either direct the call to the right department without the customer having to select options, or it places them in a priority queue to be answered as soon as possible.

All of these things would simply not be possible without our smart meters “talking” to us.

With technology improving at a lightning pace, opportunities to service the customer will be endless – and we embrace it.

Jim Garrett,  Director of operations, Utilita Energy