WRITTEN BY ENERGYX SOLUTIONS’ WRITER ∙ TORONTO, ONTARIO

According to The Gartner Group, $42.50 is the average amount utilities in the U.S. spend to serve a customer.

That cost includes:

• Call centre costs (IT systems, staff)

• Billing staff

• Service and outreach costs

Utilities who have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers can save significantly on their customer care costs just by reducing their cost-to-serve by one dollar. This begs the question…

How can utilities reduce their cost-to-serve?

In the face of growing customer expectations and cost pressures, the only answer for utilities to leverage technology to digitize and automate their customer care.

Delivering More Relevant Customer Service

Up to 40% of a utility call centre agent’s time is spent on overdue payments, arrangement or collections.

This why utilities around the world are now relying on apps and platforms that provide custom notifications about service, bills and programs. They’re embracing technology that can alert a customer before their payment is due, reducing the likelihood that a customer will receive an unexpectedly high bill.

Customers who’ve been proactively alerted to payments or high energy bills are happier and less likely to call about inaccurate or overdue bills.

More Accurate, Modern Billing Systems

According to First Data Utilities, about 25% of a large U.S. utility’s cost-to-serve comes from payments and billing systems.

In a time where people can order food and cars with a few clicks on their phone, legacy billing systems are not going to satisfy consumers. More and more consumers are expecting to be able to pay their bills online, and even more expect that the bills are error-free.

Better System Usability

It used to be that utilities would hire customer customer service reps (CSR) based on the amount of customers they had. If one CSR can serve 100 customers and you have 1 million customers, you would hire 1,000 CSRs...right?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. This is an expensive, outdated way to approach customer care resourcing.

Why not take a look at more efficient customer information systems? What if all of your customers’ data could exist in one central repository and integrate with utility-specific CRM tools? This provides a more seamless customer service experience on both sides.

The bottom line: if you want to reduce your cost-to-serve, embracing technology to optimize and streamline your customer customer care processes is essential.

Ready to automate your customer care and reduce your cost-to-serve?

Utilities we work with have reduced their cost-to-serve down to $5. Learn how by getting in touch with a MyEnergyXpert rep today!