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Utility companies are constantly under pressure to deliver better customer service and collect more debt faster. Whether notifying customers of service changes, scheduling service calls, delivering emergency notifications, or handling delinquent accounts, the demand on customer-facing resources can threaten the quality of service and prompt customer complaints. Automated Voice Messaging (AVM) keeps customers informed and customer service representatives productive by automating many communications tasks.

What Is AVM and Will My Customers Like It?

AVM is a powerful tool for electric, water and gas utilities that are looking to optimize their communications. Rather than wait for your customers to call you, AVM lets utilities reach out to their customers with a proactive, friendly and consistent high quality voice message that drives customers to act. Using pre-recorded messages and professional voice talents, utilities can quickly tailor and deliver a message that reflects the desired tone of the message is direct and easy to understand, and is personalized for specific segments.

Engaging in consistent, proactive contact with customers builds trust, increases satisfaction, and drives a reputation of excellence with regulators. The challenge is to stay in personal touch with a large number of customers, encourage them to use self-service options to meet their needs, and resort to live agents only when necessary. AVM ensures outstanding communication effectiveness by delivering clear messages that are delivered timely and accurately.

More and more utilities are taking advantage of AVM to improve their proactive customer communications and ultimately control the volume and type of inbound calls into a customer service call center. Based on the type of outbound voice messaging campaign, a utility can better control their inbound calls and more precisely staff their call centers with qualified agents who can support those inquiries. AVM is ideal for a majority of your customer service notifications and transactions, including:

• Minimizing inbound calls by advising customers in advance of disruptive events like service outages and statement changes;
• Delivering quick-to-market customer notifications for unplanned emergencies;
• Reaching out to consumers with proactive service call confirmations, service restoration updates, or curtailment notifications;
• Automating the immediate resolution of simple accounting issues and billing questions;
• Providing customers with proactive access to self-service payment processing; and
• Reaching more consumers within a limited time window using unlimited telephony capacity.

Today, consumers are accustomed to instant gratification and have an expectation that they can access and receive information on demand. With that said, an issue or opportunity surrounding their gas or electricity service would rank very highly in the “immediate notification” realm. Voice messaging is used widely because it provides a personalized, cost-effective and immediate one-to-one customer interaction.

For less immediate notifications, many utilities rely on direct mail to inform their customers of new programs and service offerings. But this proves to be costly when compared to voice messaging. In fact, one utility recently used voice messaging to enroll eligible customers in a low-income energy assistance program. The total cost per enrollment using voice messaging was $1.60 compared to $10.00 for direct mail.

The Special Challenges of Keeping Customers Informed

Managing utilities customer care resources is a daunting task. Customers demand to be well-informed about service interruptions and outages, whether they are caused by accident or scheduled maintenance. And of course, any changes to billing statements or rates cause waves of inbound calls that can completely overwhelm your customer service staff for variable periods of time.

AVM gives utilities the power to cost-effectively reach the widest range of customers in the shortest timeframe, while also delivering personalized communications that produce superior customer satisfaction levels. For example, in an attempt to pre-empt inbound calls when it instituted a new billing format, a regional utility provider used AVM to alert customers of this new format in advance of receiving their bills. In just days, the utility reached four million customers, targeting different regions at specific times to coincide with bill dates. Customer inquiries into its inbound call center were reduced by 75 percent, saving the utility an estimated $300,000. And because AVM technology is so advanced, it can accurately detect answering machines and voice mail systems so that customers that were not reached live received a clean, complete message that explained the changes in their bill.

Collecting the Debt and Preserving the Relationship

As the threat of recession looms over the U.S. economy, consumers are struggling to keep up with their monthly bills and many are already inundated with late payment notices for their mortgage, credit card, automobile, phone, cable, and home energy needs. Many of these lenders and service providers are adopting new channels of communication to cost-effectively reach debtors faster and increase the likelihood of payment over the many other bills piling up in the debtor’s mail box. Utilities are realizing great success using automated voice messaging, which reaches late payers with effective and personalized messages that increase payments and drive down the cost of collections. As the economy slows, utilities that employ automated voice messaging solutions will enjoy a competitive advantage over other service providers who are also vying for a share of consumers’ shrinking wallets.

Using automated voice messaging, utilities can reach out to late payers with an informative and consistent high quality voice message that drives debtors to act. Using pre-recorded messages and professional voice talents, utilities can easily tailor and deliver an automated message that reflects the desired tone of the message, is direct and easy to understand, and is personalized for each call recipient. Because AVM technology is so advanced, you can verify the recipient is the right party without any agent interaction. Based on certain business rules and customer segmentation, the debtor can be immediately connected to a live agent to make a payment, or transferred into a self-service payment IVR system.

While customer care is paramount to a utility provider, often times that relationship is jeopardized when a customer has missed payments or has repeatedly neglected to pay for their service for an extended period of time. It is vital to address late payers promptly and collect balances at an early stage, if possible, while at the same time maintaining a positive relationship. AVM helps utilities reduce the cost of debt collection and shrink the collections cycle by:

• Decreasing delinquencies by reaching out to late payers with effective, personalized messages;
• Providing convenient, immediate access to self-service payment options;
• Collecting more revenue within a shorter period of time using fewer agents;
• Managing call volumes to keep agents busy, but not buried, by turning cold outbound calls into warm inbound calls;
• Ensuring the highest quality customer interaction; and
• Reducing cost-per-contact by automatically verifying the right party, thus increasing the percentage of agent time spent on high-value contacts.

Conclusion

AVM is an extremely effective communications tool—not only do customers prefer it, it delivers a high-quality, branded message at a reduction of the cost. And while traditional on-premise dialing solutions have been delivering phone messages for years, they require an upfront investment and a lengthy integration. In an on-demand model, AVM eliminates upfront costs and accelerates the time to results. As a result, utilities can reduce their call center costs and improve agent morale while increasing qualified up-sell opportunities. Any utility that is serious about controlling costs and customer service should take advantage of AVM.

About the Author: Eric Keough is vice president of Consumer Direct Strategies, SoundBite Communications.

Thu May 01 00:00:00 CDT 2008

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