mThink

With the new administration talking about a trillion dollars of infrastructure investment, the time for the intelligent utility of the future is now. Political pressure and climate change are going to drive massive investments in renewable and clean energy and smart grid technology. These investments will empower customers through the launch and adoption of demand response and energy efficiency programs.

A little over a year ago, the challenges facing the global energy and utilities market were driving a significant wedge between utilities and their customers. In Western European markets, price increases across gas, electricity and water, combined with increased corporate earnings, left many utilities in the uncomfortable position of being seen as profiteering from customers unable to change suppliers for significant benefit.

THE CHANGING DYNAMICS OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

The utilities industry is in transition. External factors – including shifts in governmental policies, a globally felt sense of urgency about conserving energy, advances in power generation techniques and new technologies – are driving massive changes throughout the industry. Utilities are also under internal pressure to prevent profit margins from eroding.

The great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, chances are you will end up somewhere else.” Yet many utilities possess only a limited understanding of their call center operations, which can prevent them from reaching the ultimate goal: improving performance and customer satisfaction, and reducing costs.

Utilities face three key barriers in seeking to improve their call center operations:

Customers want the best your company has to offer. To deliver, you need an integrated customer experience across all touch points throughout your organization. This requires a complete and consistent view of your customers. First-generation CRM promised these capabilities but has often fallen short. Historically, high cost, complexity and drawn-out implementations contributed to nearly a [...]

Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) is the leading provider of decision management solutions powered by advanced analytics. Fair Isaac solutions make mission-critical business decisions that are more precise, consistent and agile. Thousands of companies in more than 80 countries use Fair Isaac technology to acquire customers more efficiently, increase customer value and retention, reduce fraud and [...]

Applying adaptive CRM capabilities to CRM and other customer-facing systems enables the enterprise to learn from their customer interactions in real time to continuously refine the best next action or best next offer. Adaptive capabilities enable customer-facing systems to capture details about a customer interaction where they were not able to do so before, pumping [...]

After wrestling with first-generation customer relationship management solutions that were difficult to use, customize and integrate, organizations have learned the importance of having a CRM solution that is flexible enough to fit the way they do business – a solution that enables improved customer loyalty and profitability and supports innovation across the whole organization. This [...]

Not long ago, choosing customer relationship management (CRM) software was relatively simple, with one company, Siebel Systems, dominating the market. Even when competing vendors appeared, organizations were able to select their software by simply comparing product features to their checklist requirements. Nowadays, most organizations that try to follow the classic checklist approach soon find that [...]