Customer Service & Billing: Flexibility to meet future change

The Challenge

Smart metering and grids are seen by both governments and utilities as the future of sustainable energy supply, and a necessary tool in delivering sustainable, reliable and affordable energy in the coming decades. As the main point of interaction between businesses and consumers, customer service and billing (CS&B) is one of the most important touch points.

A well-structured organisation that finds a balance between efficiency and flexibility for its front and back end staff will be well-positioned to compete on a global scale. To maintain competitive advantage utilities need to understand customers, their needs and the benefits of better interaction and knowledge. They also need to integrate these new offerings into the existing CS&B systems as pillars for new innovative positioning.

Our Answer

Smart technology will drive new capabilities in service delivery across the energy and utilities sector, and bring new ways for utilities to interact with their customers. Energy customers, from the individual consumer up to municipal level, are demanding ever greater transparency, quality of service and guidance on the use of resources.

There are three main areas that energy retail companies need to address to ensure that their CS&B remains market-leading:

• A customer-centric approach – Suppliers must transform their processes from meter-based to customer-based processes.
• Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Capabilities – Having made historical investments into IT systems, suppliers must now introduce SOA and CRM capabilities, alongside a unified front end, to ensure that the investment is maximised.
• Customer knowledge – Fundamental to every supplier’s Smart future will be their ability to track and analyse their relationships with their clients.

Learn more in our Thought Piece: “Create new energy choices for smart consumers”