The Utility Industry is facing complex challenges that will affect the ability of contact centers to effectively service their callers at a manageable cost. The introduction of regulatory call standards, the peaks and valleys of call volumes associated with regular billing cycles, heightened security concerns, environmental concerns, and the increase in customer expectations around service levels have resulted in contact center costs rising to cover training, retention plans and, call handling.

Automating routine non-specialist calls, such as outage information or balance checks, can significantly reduce the cost of call handling, enhance customer service, and improve the agent and caller experience. In the US the utility industry has made substantial gains in customer service by, amongst other things, providing a wide variety of payment options and making customer service available 24 hours a day [1].

Deregulation is slowly affecting all segments of the utility industry, empowering consumers to not only choose their utilities suppliers based on cost but also on customer service. Pressure is being exerted for utilities to not only become low-cost suppliers, but also to improve customer service levels. In the UK more than 2.8m energy customers switched suppliers in the first seven months of 2007 [2] with almost one in five saying that they have left a company solely because of a bad experience with the contact center. This switch is equivalent to something in the order of £8.4 million in lost business [3].

Sample Utility Solutions

Business Drivers to Improve Service

Reduce call queues – With agents spending more time handling routine calls, queues increase and lead to caller frustration and increased cost.

Reduce call handling time – Larger call volumes mean that agents need to spend their time efficiently. Agents can spend up to 45% of their time on the phone handling simple enquiries such as checking balance.

Reduce cost to serve customers – Utility providers are under constant pressure to ensure the highest quality service, and provide a consistent and concise user experience, while reducing and controlling cost.

Skilled agents handling routine calls – Your agents are often highly trained customer service representatives that are tied up answering routine calls rather than handling complex enquiries or cross/up-selling.

Improve customer service – The main sources of caller dissatisfaction are time spent trying to get through to a utility company and the associated cost, the inability to speak to someone, and the frustration incurred when the agent is unable to resolve the query [4].

A study by the Ascent Group [5] examined the characteristics of some of the companies who consistently deliver high-quality customer service. The top five characteristics believed to be critical to high customer satisfaction and service excellence were:

• Respect for employees and customers
• Empower employees to do what is right
• Customer-friendly technologies matched to customer needs and expectations
• Provide a variety of customer service options and choices for customers
• Leverage technology to improve internal processes

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