Utilities

Many utility organizations operate heterogeneous systems environments in which there is limited integration between billing, service delivery, asset management and back-office solutions. The situation is further compounded by the limited functionality of many of these systems and their inflexibility in terms of allowing for the rapid introduction of new products and services.

Utilities suffer significant constraints and bear additional costs including:

• Contact centre inefficiency: Lack of system integration coupled with limited functionality results in increased agent hand-offs and higher call handling times leading to reduced levels of customer service/satisfaction, lower call centre agent productivity and higher operational costs.

• Reduced operational effectiveness: The inability to accurately measure and manage operational costs at the installed equipment/plant level prevents accurate targeting of operational maintenance/capital investment funds.

• Reduced field force effectiveness: Limited integration between customer service and works management solutions prevents workforce optimization.

• Revenue leakage: Resulting from the inability to bill for certain services provided to the customer.

• Reduced collections effectiveness and increased bad debt costs: Lack of accurate customer data means that emerging customer payment and bad debt issues are not identified in time, resulting in increased collections costs and lower rates of debt recovery.

• Limited web and IVR self-service capabilities: Impacting loyalty and retention as customers are not able to effectively transact in the manner they desire, resulting in reduced customer satisfaction and increased operating costs as the majority of customers transact via the phone into call centers.

• Customer defection and churn: The inability to rapidly respond to competitor offerings coupled with reduced customer satisfaction, resulting from disjointed customer interaction processes exacerbates customer churn.

• Increased system development and support costs: The current systems environment is expensive to maintain, modify and enhance, resulting in significant additional annual IT operating costs.

• Reduced management effectiveness: Significant time is spent extracting, normalizing and preparing data, meaning that up-to-date accurate performance information is unavailable for use by operational managers in decision support.

• Emerging Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI)/Smart Grid technologies and related DOE/regulatory/legislative orders: The advancing technology in the AMI/Smart Grid space together with the recent flurry of DOE, regulatory and legislative orders has created an opportunity to transform the industry. The issue is knowing how much to spend on which technologies and when, all while ensuring the maximum benefit realization for the utility, the consumer and the environment.

• Enterprise Application Services