Fortnightly Supplement
Technology Molds Corporate Culture, Customer Service
April 30, 1999
Lisa Prevost
Everything automated but the service reps. Are they next?
Back when electricity customers were captives to their local utility, utility employees could rest assured that a call missed today could always be tended to tomorrow. The customer at the other end of the line had no choice but to call back later.
Laura Greer, data administrator for the customer care center at Central Illinois Lighting Co. in Peoria, recalls her former days as a service agent working the phones. "Before we had a phone switch, the phone rang, and you picked it up if you felt like it," Greer says.
Those days are gone, of course. And at CILCO's new state-of-the-art call center, software enhancements to the sophisticated phone switch provide supervisors with real-time computer displays of how many calls are coming in, and how many callers are holding. Customer service agents, or CSAs, are rated on key performance indicators, and told daily how many calls they missed the day before.
This kind of internal cultural shift is inevitable in a competitive utility market. Long catered to by banks, investment companies, long-distance carriers and catalogue retailers, customers now expect utilities to serve them with equal efficiency. In short, says Sue Stratton, a telemarketing expert who left Ruppmann Marketing Technologies in 1997 to direct CILCO's customer care center, customers expect their utility to be readily accessible, and to answer the phone quickly. Moreover, she adds, CILCO's customer surveys have shown that callers expect to talk to knowledgeable employees, and to receive adequate and immediate responses to their questions or problems.
CILCO is among a minority of utilities committing the time and money required to meet those higher expectations. The majority of utilities, say call center technology consultants, still have catching up to do. "Utilities are getting the essentials down today," says Gary Redman of Chicago's Ameritech Call Center Solutions, which consulted on the CILCO upgrade. "They set up a decent ACD [automatic call distribution] system, implement IVR [interactive voice response] technology, and for the most part, that's where it stops."
* Set To Boom In 2000 *
To a great extent, utilities are simply financially unable to invest more heavily in advanced call center capabilities until they take care of billing system requirements necessitated by the Y2K problem. But come 2000, utilities who hope to compete successfully ultimately will have to make customer service their top priority, say consultants, vendors and managers of some of the more progressive utility call centers.
Though technology needs will vary depending on the utility's focus, chances are that top-notch customer service will require at least these five key technologies:
An ACD with advanced capabilities, including skills-based routing, which routes calls to the most appropriate service rep based on the customer's response to recorded prompts;
A forecasting/scheduling tool, to provide both real-time and historical data pertaining to worker productivity;
Computer telephony integration (CTI), the marrying of the phone switch with the computer system to enable a number of sophisticated applications, such as intelligent routing and data mining;
A quality monitoring device to record calls for performance review, and, in more advanced applications, measure callers' success at navigating their way through the IVR menu selections; and
Internet access, through a web site that offers customers the option of taking care of utility business without making a phone call at all (see sidebar, Reducing Calls Through E-commerce).
Although CILCO is a small player in the Illinois market, its expected acquisition by AES has provided it with the resources to compete for market share as deregulation kicks in this year, says utility spokesman Neal Johnson. About a year and a half ago, CILCO consolidated its 11 district offices into one high-tech call center serving its 210,000 electric and gas customers. Sixty CSAs work shifts to provide 24-hour/seven-day-a-week coverage of the phones, which are answered via PCs on their desks. The work horse of the center is a Rockwell "Spectrum" phone switch, part of an ACD package that includes a variety of routing options.
According to Stratton, skills-based routing is of greatest benefit to CILCO's commercial customers, who make up the bulk of daily callers. The system quickly routes commercial customers to the most seasoned reps, ensuring that these callers won't spend more time on the phone than necessary.
* Using "Intelligence" To Route Calls *
In essence, skills-based routing segments certain groups of callers to serve them more efficiently, says Layman Harang, director of product marketing for Intecom, the Dallas-based maker of ACD systems. "You call an 800 number, and you specify that you want to speak Spanish," he says. "That call is routed to those customer service reps who speak Spanish. If they're all busy, the call might overflow to people who use Spanish as a secondary language."
Utilities that combine their IVR with CTI technology open up a host of more sophisticated routing possibilities. For instance, once the phone system is "knowledgeable of and influenced by" the customer information stored in the computer system, Harang says, the utility can implement what is called "intelligent" routing based on various types of customer information. IVR prompts callers to punch in their account numbers. This provides the information necessary to route the calls in any number of ways.
Intelligent call distribution is crucial for large utilities with multiple call center sites, notes Redman. During outages, when call volume soars, an advanced distribution system will route those calls efficiently, thereby preventing long waits, busy signals and unanswered rings.
"With intelligent call distribution, you can take a caller and intelligently get them to where they need to be, and reduce the length of the call, as opposed to simply overflowing the call from one location to the next with no intelligence involved," Redman says.
CTI also opens the way to more personalized service. Elaborate information about callers can be reviewed before the call is answered through the use of computer "screen pops." Duke Energy, heralded for its call center built around an Intecom ACD system in Charlotte, N.C., already uses "screen pops" to synchronize customer data with phone calls, according to Harang.
"It is an opportunity for a call center to take control of its technology back from its caller," he says. "And it allows higher priority customers to go to the front of the line."
Public Service Electric & Gas Co. of New Jersey plans to add CTI to its call center operations next year, after deregulation has been signed into law, says customer contact process manager Henry Campos. PSE&G's CSAs potentially could use the technology to sell more service contracts to heating customers, he notes. A customer profile will tell the CSA whether the caller is a heating customer, and they can then search to determine whether the customer is under contract.
* "Big Brother" Watches CSA Volume *
With 2.1 million customers throughout New Jersey, PSE&G gradually has been upgrading operations at its call centers in Cranford and Bordentown during the last five years in anticipation of deregulation. The utility invested in an Aspect phone switch, switched telephone vendors in order to get economical 800 service, and hired more CSAs. But now, with 60 percent of its 200-odd reps posting less than a year of service, PSE&G has to pay particular care to employee training and productivity. So this year the company purchased TCS forecasting and scheduling software to help it better manage the workforce.
Using historical call volume data and weather forecast information, the TCS tool predicts future call volumes and appropriate staffing levels. It also arranges employee schedules, complete with carefully timed breaks, then monitors which employees are adhering to the schedule.
"It's like Big Brother," Campos acknowledges. "But it's all part of the call center process because time is what you're really working against."
Likewise, at CILCO, where the average tenure for CSAs is 20 to 25 years, employees look forward to daily bulletins made possible by TCS reporting capabilities as a visible and immediate sign of progress, according to Greer. Every morning, an e-mailed report informs reps of how many calls came in the day before, how many were handled, how many were abandoned and how quickly they answered the calls.
"If I don't get that message out everyday, someone comes and asks me, 'how many calls did we miss yesterday?'" Greer says.
While the forecasting/scheduling tool helps measure employee productivity, one of the few ways to measure quality of performance is a call monitoring device, notes Ronald Naiman, manager of customer center operations for Connecticut Light & Power, a subsidiary of Hartford's Northeast Utilities. Recorded calls can then be used in training sessions to coach and counsel agents.
Handling 3 million calls a year, the 175 CSAs at CL&P's Wethersfield customer inquiry site are expected both to answer calls quickly and handle the call "in a quality fashion," Naiman says. "The bar is always being raised here until I feel it's competitive without outside services."
The recording of customer service calls overall has gone through several evolutions, notes Ron Elwell, senior vice president and general manager of the communications recording system division of Dictaphone. At first, utilities recorded calls only for liability reasons-to document response to an outage report, for example. During the last couple of years, with the shift toward competition, more utilities have begun recording calls to see how well agents are treating their customers, Elwell says
Technology Justifies Personnel CTI has enabled these recording systems to store detailed information about each recorded call, including the phone number of the caller, the phone number called and the extension of the agent who answered the call. That data makes it much easier for supervisors to locate recorded calls. A Dictaphone ProLog recording system installed at Northern Indiana Public Service Co., for example, enables supervisors there to retrieve calls within seconds. PSE&G too relies on ProLog recording units for its customer contact evaluation, and is building a library of calls that are particularly useful for training.
Now, Elwell says, the monitoring process in other industries is expanding, and utilities will gradually begin to realize that their focus on the agent is too narrow. That's because customer dissatisfaction with call centers rises with every transfer within the system, he notes. If the IVR is inefficient, customers may be disgruntled before they even get to an agent.
CTI-enabled technology makes it possible to record a customer call from the minute he enters the IVR system, tracking his progress through the transferals and recording his conversations with every agent or supervisor.
"You need to look at the way the entire environment works in supporting those agents," Elwell says. "The industry furthest along on this process is the mutual fund industry because it is so hyper-competitive."
At CILCO, employees initially were apprehensive about all these changes, particularly when they saw a director coming in from outside the utility industry, Stratton says. "It was like, 'Oh no, now we're going to have rules and structure,'" she recalls. "But at the same time, we've given great benefits to our folks and they're very committed to the company. They recognize that deregulation is going to change the company."
And at PSE&G too, customer service personnel see the writing on the wall. "Their jobs are being questioned: Will we keep this service in-house, or is there an outside vendor that can provide this service at a lower cost?" Campos says. "They understand what their contribution to the organization has to be in order for us to be players in the marketplace in the future." F
[Sidebar article]
* Reducing Calls Through E-commerce: Moving from ear to eye gives customers more options.*
The vast majority of, if not all, utilities have websites. But only a handful offer the kinds of services customers increasingly expect from Internet access.
"You may be able to send your utility an e-mail, though that may stretch because many of them don't even want you to contact them," says Mark Johnson of Metzler & Associates, a Chicago consultant. "They're that cavalier about their customers." Johnson and other customer service experts advise utilities not to underestimate the importance of e-commerce as they go about upgrading their call center operations. Investments in new technologies shouldn't be made without consideration of the need for web integration.
Two utilities at the forefront of e-commerce--Florida Power & Light and Consolidated Edison Co. of New York--are rolling out online bill presentment programs with an eye toward greater convenience for Internet-savvy customers. This also means significant printing and postage savings for the company.
Other online services being offered by these and other utilities can help reduce call center volume. These include interactive voice access to customer service reps, access to account information and placement of connect/disconnect orders.
Johnson maintains that shifting customer inquiries to the Internet can yield significant cost savings, even if only a small proportion of utility customers take advantage of the service. By his calculations, a utility that handles an average 4,000 calls a day at a cost of about $15 each would save more than $1 million annually if just five percent of its customers switched to the Internet.
Florida Power & Light began offering e-mail access and real-time account data to its 3.7 million metered accounts in 1996, according to Jill Sands, manager of billing and financial systems. By punching in their account number, a customer can review usage, bill amounts and the date of receipt of their last payment for the previous 24 months. The system doesn't display individual names or addresses in order to protect customer privacy. Commercial customers can only pull up their information by using a designated PIN.
"School systems like it, and so do corporations who are not local but have facilities here," Sands says.
In 1997, Florida Power became one of the first nine companies in the country to offer electronic billing, she notes. Customers who choose this bill-paying option no longer receive a monthly bill in the mail; rather, they view it on their bank's website and arrange to pay the amount directly from their checking account.
"Since June 1997, about 1,600 customers have begun using electronic billing," Sands says. "But the trends are showing that probably by June of this year, you'll start to see usage go up significantly."
ConEd expects to roll out online bill presentment later this year after concluding a pilot program among its own employees, according to James W. O'Brien, customer communications manager. The utility estimates that the option eventually could cut its billing costs in half.
Enrollees in the new service will be able to view their bill in summary or full form, O'Brien says. And there will be a button for e-mail access should they have a question about the bill.
This will be the fourth paperless billing option at ConEd. The company also offers pay-by-Internet, pay-by-phone and direct debit. Last year, O'Brien noted, 14,000 ConEd customers made payments online totaling more than $4 million.
While both ConEd and Florida Power & Light say customer e-mail traffic has been relatively light so far, Layman Harang, director of product marketing for Intecom, cautions utilities not to offer e-mail access without carefully considering the implications.
"Plugging the Internet into the utility's call center is not much different than opening up a second floodgate-you're likely to get more queries without the ability to deal with it," Harang says. "If you don't have a reasonable method of responding to those e-mails, you're going to be inundated fairly rapidly."
Harang says Intecom is working on technology that would route e-mails by analyzing them electronically. [End of sidebar article]
Lisa Prevost is a freelance writer in Fairfield, Conn.
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