Utilities are always searching for ways to improve their bottom line - from looking at billing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as separate functions to a more holistic approach.
Key Value Areas:
Love their bill!!?? You can hear the gasps from the executive offices of utilities around the globe. This aspect of serving the customer is often considered – at best – to be a cost center. So how can it be that some utilities are actually embracing the billing process? With the substantial cost of producing, printing and distributing bills, very short windows for completing (in many cases) millions of bills per run, and the calls that flood the call center every time bills hit the consumers, you might think that the day will never come that utilities look at their bills with any type of affection – let alone love. But forward thinking utilities are doing just that.
Utilities are always searching for ways to improve their bottom line. Whether reducing operating costs through new technologies, enhanced efficiency or automation, the ultimate goal is to find solutions with an aggressive ROI to rapidly impact their business performance. But finding and addressing these types of opportunities among the various aspects of serving the customer are not always clear or intuitive. However, when you add it all up, efficient enhancements to your bill creation, composition, formatting, production and distribution processes can pay significant benefits; many of those benefits extend well beyond those associated with the cost of bill production.
Utilities have evolved from looking at billing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as separate functions – where the formatting and printing of the bill was separated from data-driven customer campaigns – to a more holistic approach. Application providers such as SAP now provide a comprehensive and optimized end-to-end communication process based on combing both billing and customer data. This leads to the logical next step; leveraging the bill as a critical and consistent channel to improve customer communication and satisfaction. By combining transactional data with CRM strategies utilities can now drive successful personalized campaigns inserted directly on the bill to cement customer relationships.
Prior to this evolution, the output portion of a billing process was often an afterthought handled as an IT issue. Now it has become an integral element in achieving the performance goals of utility departments such as Customer Service and Marketing. In the case of SAP, the company recognized the need to extend their end-to-end Customer Relationship and Billing (CR&B) processes with an integrated high-volume document solution and endorsed StreamServe’s Enterprise Document Presentment (EDP) for SAP for Utilities.
“The ability to take advantage of an agile and fully integrated bill presentment solution can provide multi-faceted benefits to the utility, notes Henry Bailey, Vice President of Industry Solutions at SAP Americas, Inc. When combined with a robust CR&B system such as SAP, Enterprise Document Presentment solutions can provide an end-to-end solution that reduces the cost to serve while improving the document’s ability to communicate with the consumer – reducing calls to the call center, improving the meter-to-cash process, as well as the ability to rapidly implement new customer programs.”
So how exactly do you leverage your SAP customer and billing data to optimize processes and improve customer communication while reducing cost to serve?
Let’s have a closer look at some key value areas:
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Call Center Costs
With studies indicating that Call Center costs represent upwards of 17-22 percent of the overall cost to serve customers, utilities are always searching for ways to trim these expenses. Most utilities have already turned to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, web self-service and other methods of handling customer inquiries to avoid the requirement of an expensive live conversation with a customer service representative.
Given these cost savings, you might also assume that utilities would be doing everything possible to eliminate those inquiries altogether, and where a call is required, to reduce the talk time for each customer call. A significant contributor towards accomplishing this goal is to take advantage of the most consistent touch point a utility has with their customers – the bill – to provide them with a more user-friendly, easy-to-understand document. A personalized, graphically-rich, informative bill that provides an easy to understand representation of customer usage via a graph or bar chart can greatly reduce the volume of customer inquiry calls. Taken further, with the growing number of non-native English speakers in the U.S., the ability to provide customers the choice of receiving a bill in their native language also goes a long way in reducing billing inquiries.
However, in many cases, the rigid nature of billing output, particularly from older and disparate Customer Information Systems (CIS) and CRM systems, makes it necessary to have an end-to-end integrated solution to reduce consumer confusion and ultimately, an expensive customer service call. With utilities indicating that 15 percent or more of the calls they receive originate as a result of customer confusion related to bill interpretation, these savings can quickly add up.
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High-Volume Bill Production and Distribution Challenges
The benefits of flexible and efficient high-volume bill production and distribution can not be discounted. There are many aspects of these processes where finding the right bill production and presentment solution can reap significant savings:
- Rapid bill design & formatting
- Increased print process efficiencies
- Postal sorting and optimization
- Leverage eServices and electronic bill distribution
One sure source of migraines for anyone involved in the billing process is the requirement for a complete revamp of the customer bill. Bill design and formatting can be not only costly, but time consuming. Recently a large utility went through this exercise and just over a year later – and after a $2 million dollar investment – they now have a handsome new design. However, because this was an effort that relies on hard coded formatting, they remain in the same position they did before; any substantial change will require significant script edits, along with the associated burden that places on their IT organization.
Likewise, print processing and postal preparation can add significant cost to serving your customers. And although electronic invoices have been available for some time now, actually converting customers to paperless invoicing often proves difficult. Marketing inserts designed to convert customers to e-invoices are often discarded making e-adoption difficult.
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EDP to the Rescue
With the addition of a robust Enterprise Document Presentment solution, forward-thinking utilities around the globe have found that they can meet their goals for increased customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing call volume and talk time. These early-adopting utilities represent just the beginning of this trend, since according to IDC the Dynamic Enterprise Publishing market (of which EDP is a part) is growing at nearly 27%, and is forecast to attain software revenue of over $1 billion by 2009.
An effective way to describe an EDP solution would be to envision an application at the intersection of IT, Customer Service and Marketing for personalized messaging, customer satisfaction, retention, reduction in support costs, and ultimately organic revenue growth. Putting a document output management strategy in place that incorporates an enterprise document presentment solution will enable utilities to take data streams from a variety of sources – in virtually any format – to create and distribute easy to understand bills that speak to the customer with personalized messages. EDP allows utilities to distribute bills via virtually any communication channel the customer prefers; print, email, fax, SMS or via a utility’s extranet.
Another significant benefit of deploying an EDP solution is the control that organizations gain in terms of their ability to access data throughout the enterprise. This enables them to put marketing messaging and offer integration into the hands of those who know it best; the marketing department. No longer is marketing reliant on a heavily stretched IT department to integrate their messages, campaigns and compliance requirements. Rather than waiting days, weeks – or even longer – for IT to implement marketing initiatives, the marketing department need only access a browser-based application to add or change business rules, offers, segments, etc. This same dynamic messaging capability can also provide rapid brand identity changes which are becoming more prevalent as utilities continue to consolidate.
When utilities are able to present bills in a manner that makes them easier to understand; including elements such as color formats, language preference, past usage graphs, self-service web pointers, etc., overall call volume declines dramatically. Additionally, customer satisfaction increases and support costs decline – the holy grail of every customer service executive.
There is compelling benefits for the utility and the customer. And with authorities also adopting those principles, it will no longer be optional. For example in Europe an Energy Services Directive was enacted to drive conservation through customer bills. According to the directive, bills should be presented in clear and understandable terms and “provide customers with a comprehensive account of current energy costs.” The directive was designed to enable consumers to make better-informed decisions about managing their individual energy consumption by making the following information available on bills, contracts, transactions and/or receipts, in clear and understandable terms:
- Information about current actual energy prices and consumption
- Comparative information showing the customer’s consumption for the same period in the previous year, preferably in graphical form
- Wherever possible, comparative information for an average or benchmarked user in the same category.
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Maximizing the Call
Eliminating calls – while providing considerable bottom line contribution – is only the beginning. The next step is to find solutions that reduce the overall talk time of the representative. While CRM systems can provide a history of previous interactions with each customer, they may not provide insight into a current call.
Therefore, it is critical that Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) are provided access to an archived version of the actual bill the customer is calling about – rather than a green screen of data alone. With an easily retrieved facsimile of the bill, the CSR can address questions while viewing the document the customer has in front of them, in a manner that makes sense to the caller. This capability means that bill inquiry issues can be quickly identified and rectified for further operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction. The ability to immediately redistribute the bill electronically translates into a reduction in Days Sales Outstanding for customers that require a new bill be sent.
With the understanding that multiple exposures to offers and marketing messages are often necessary to change a customer’s behavior, the ability to view the actual document also allows the CSR to reinforce the marketing messages that are contained on the bill via a two-way conversation. For initiatives like electronic invoicing, this capability can provide an extremely compelling return on investment.
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Green Savings
Addressing the issue of global climate change is also a contributing factor which poses challenges for the utilities industry, its billing systems, and how they leverage customer communications; but it can also become an asset in driving changes in a customer’s behavior.
A driving factor in which global climate change impacts billing and customer service is the entire process of bill production and postal distribution. Not only is this costly to the utility, it is also costly to the environment. In an industry that should take advantage of every opportunity to promote their green initiatives, the ability to leverage the white space on a bill using rules-based personalized marketing messages as an incentive for customers to switch to electronic invoices can provide substantial cost savings. Not only does this reinforce their commitment to the environment, it also provides the customer with a sense of control over their relationship with the utility. Use the customer bill to educate the consumer and promote the concepts of energy conservation and renewable energy options.
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Savings + Simplicity = Love
Enterprise Document Presentment solutions can provide bottom line impact in multiple facets of supporting the customer. Utilities who have implemented an EDP solution have improved customer service, reduced inquiry calls and talk time, cut document design and production costs and increased e-invoice conversion. With significant impact across multiple departments, the savings quickly add up. In most cases, an EDP solution will provide a return on investment in less than a year – with many utilities realizing an ROI of 3-6 months. Now that’s a love affair!
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About StreamServe
StreamServe, Inc. enables organizations to capitalize on the value of existing enterprise content by extending the business process with the dynamic composition, management, and output of enterprise documents to customers, suppliers and partners through any channel regardless of application source. StreamServe solutions enable a broad range of output from high-value to high volume. Built on an open architecture, StreamServe’s industry leading solutions support rapid deployment and integration with ERP, ECM, and CRM systems extending back-office applications to IT and business users alike. StreamServe is an SAP Software Partner and a member of the SAP NetWeaver Advisory Board. StreamServe Utilities is an SAP-endorsed business solution. Like SAP, StreamServe supports enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
StreamServe’s strategic partners, include Adobe Systems, IBM, InfoPrint Solutions Company, Infor, Lawson, and SAP. Headquartered in Burlington, MA with 14 locations worldwide, StreamServe serves more than 4,900 customers in 130 countries, including Oklahoma Gas & Electric, ESB, E.ON and CLP Power Hong Kong.
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