Utility delights its customers

May utilities delight customers? Yes, of course! Here are some tips how the utilities industry improves customer service to build positive customer experience and thus counteract their escape.

Shorten customer service time

Service and contact time, how long customers are waiting in a queue, how many times they had to contact (busy lines), were redirected from one to other person, how many times they contacted to solve the problem.

First Contact Resolution

Agents who access the data and call recordings simply and easily can close matters during the first contact, efficiently solve complaints and shorten contact time. Close integration of contact center and CRM /ERP is necessary. Widgets offered by SAP are the newest trend.

Personalization

Customers’ identification and prioritization, redirecting customers to their agents, personal messages on IVR. Data exchange between systems happens several times in fractions of seconds. It works reliably in homogeneous environments such as SAP offers.

The same service everywhere

It is difficult to manage remote customer service in utilities – contact center and branch offices, service engineers, second-line experts. To get real 360 customer view every contact should be recorded in the database and everybody in the organisation should provide conscious customer service, not only customer service agents.

Self-service – IVR is more and more important

On IVR customers choose ways of documents and invoices delivery, get other information from CRM and ERP. Using IVR customers key meters (water, electricity) status into the billing system. Service technicians in field record on IVR information and messages regarding outages and restoration time solution (calling customer is identified and gets personalized messages or SMS is sent). Other information required by the regulator (e.g. GDPR) and the callback service are also provided on IVR.

Management – precise forecasts and decisions

Reporting contains communication data and all customers’ contact points. The data gives managers the full 360 customer view. It allows managers to evaluate each customer and its cost, set trends and changes which they should implement in management and service. Afterwards, managers combine data with different tags to find answers to questions about quality, problems, peaks. They also group responses into regions, groups of agents and customers, time of contact, events, etc.

Integrated solutions give real benefits. The data is complete, always up to date and without errors. The agent’s working time is shorten thanks to automatic data fulfilment, process management and self-service. System integration reflects in the time which in customer service counts twice – from the point of view of customers and agents.