In the wake of the new normal, Utility providers today are facing challenges fierce competition, environmental sustainability, and an aging infrastructure and workforce. As the regulatory environment pushes the utility industry toward greater transparency, increased efficiency and the adoption of smart technologies, many players are attempting to strike a balance between profitability and customer experience. To strike that delicate balance and a Utility Provider must reduce the cost of doing business and improve the quality of services delivered to customers. Teaming up with a utility contact center outsourcing provider is their best viable option.
The pandemic has significantly changed the utility customers’ needs and expectations. For example- previously only millennials used to opt for self-service but today, a lot of customers from other demographics have embraced digital communications such as email, chat support and social media communications with their brand. So, today more utility customers are reaching out to brands via chat and social media for prompt and effective solutions.
While the effect of the pandemic is expected to subside after a while, the changes in customer behavior and their expectations is here to stay and to adapt to the changes the utility providers must opt for customer-centric utility contact center solutions. With the right outsourcing partner utility companies eliminate customer communication errors from their processes and boost their efficiency and performance. It in turn will ensure a better customer service and customer experience, which is a key business differentiator in this age of competition.
How can a utility call center outsourcing partner can help your energy and utilities business?
If you delve deep into the study of customer lifecycle with its related touchpoints you can break the utility customer lifecycle down into the following sequence:
- Pre-enrollment stage
- Enrollment stage
- Post-enrollment stage
- After-sales service
A utility call center partner can help your utility business in all these stages and help you deliver a stellar CX across all touchpoints. Let’s find out how it is possible for a utility call center to deliver a superior experience across all these touchpoints.
How Will Utility Contact Centers Help Utility Businesses Deliver A Superior CX Across Customer Lifecycle?
In the wake of the new normal, Utility providers today face challenges like fierce competition, environmental sustainability, and aging infrastructure and workforce. As the regulatory environment pushes the utility industry toward greater transparency, increased efficiency, and intelligent technologies, many utility players are attempting to strike a balance between profitability and customer experience. To strike that delicate balance, a Utility Provider must reduce the cost of doing business and improve the quality of services delivered
to customers. Teaming up with a utility contact center outsourcing provider is their best viable option.
The pandemic has significantly changed the utility customers’ needs and expectations.
For example- previously, only millennials used to opt for self-service. Still, today, many customers from other demographics have embraced digital communications such as email, chat support, and social media communications with their brand. So, today more utility customers are reaching out to brands via chat and social media for prompt and practical solutions.
While the effect of the pandemic is expected to subside after a while, the changes in customer behavior and their expectations are here to stay and to adapt to the changes; the utility providers must opt for customer-centric utility contact center solutions. With the right outsourcing partner, utility companies eliminate customer communication errors from their processes and boost their efficiency and performance. It, in turn, will ensure better customer service and customer experience, which is a crucial business differentiator in this age of competition.
How can a utility call center outsourcing partner can help your energy and utilities business?
If you delve deep into the study of customer lifecycle with its related touchpoints you can break the utility customer lifecycle down into the following sequence:
- Pre-enrollment stage
- Enrollment stage
- Post-enrollment stage
- After-sales service
A utility call center partner can help your utility business in all these stages and help you deliver a stellar CX across all touchpoints. So let’s find out how a utility call center can deliver a superior experience across all these touchpoints.
Pre-Enrollment Stage
Market Research – while entering a new market or engaging a new audience, you need a good market research. A utility call center with stellar market research capability can help you understand the market and your audience with their market research and survey campaigns. A multilingual call center can do the job even better.
Digital Marketing Campaigns – a Utility contact center can help utility businesses launch a digital marketing campaign consisting of telemarketing, online, and direct marketing campaigns to spread awareness about your services.
Enrollment Stage
Lead Generation – A utility contact center can offer high-quality lead generation services to fill your sales pipeline with high-quality conversion-ready offers.
Sales – If you outsource your telesales process to a utility call center, they can ensure better sales figures. The call center agents are well trained in the sales process and can convert a prospect into a paying customer. Apart from these, they can also cross-sell and upsell to ensure better revenue generation.
Welcome Calls – Once your business has acquired a new customer, your outsourcing partner can contact them and provide them with the required brand information. The utility call center agent can also answer their queries and help your business make a great first impression.
Post Enrollment Stage
Customer service – A omnichannel multilingual utility contact center can deliver stellar customer service to your customers at every touchpoint, ensuring a superior CX throughout the customer lifecycle. Prompt service to personalization while adhering to industry standards and your brand voice is the key to delivering a high-quality CX. An experienced utility call center like Fusion can help you with just that.
Billing and Statements – You can outsource your billing and payment process to a utility contact center. They can help you provide your customers with accurate information regarding bill generation, billing invoices. In addition, the right call center partner can ensure fast bill generation, on-time data delivery, and better reconciliation across different processes.
Payment Reversal/Adjustment Claims – Utility customers can face issues with wrong payment amounts and invalid data due to third-party intervention for bill payments. These customers then claim for incorrect entry, which must be verified by the claims team and sent to the operations for reversal/adjustment in the record. An experienced call center can help you resolve these issues quickly and minimize the number of errors.
After Sales Stage
Complaints Management – A good utility contact center partner can help you handle all customer complaints and offer prompt and accurate resolution via voice, email, social media and chat.
With the help of chatbots, it is possible to reduce complaints resolution time with an automated response, sometimes even without a human interaction. If any case needs human intervention, omnichannel call centers can seamlessly align an agent to handle the issue.
Inquiry handling – Utility BPOs can help you mitigate customer queries after the sales with timely and accurate information dissemination.
Feedback – call center agents can help you gather essential customer insight through feedback surveys. These customer insights can help you understand what the customers want and take business decisions based on these insights.
Conclusion
As in all other industries, the utility landscape will continue to change. Stakeholders across the spectrum will need to stay ahead of the curve to survive. In addition, digital adoption in the present situation has changed the essence of utility customers. Therefore, creating a CX strategy with the customer at the center, regardless of the technological and process changes required, can offer utility businesses the flexibility to adapt to and keep pace with ever-changing customer demands. And utility call centers will play a significant role in executing that CX strategy.
