Industry Overview

In an increasingly competitive market, finding ways to attract and retain customers has become a major focus within the utility industries. As price wars and high fuel costs create new challenges in maintaining profit margins, the effective management of costs now represents a parallel challenge.

Maintaining contact centres is a major operational overhead for all utility companies, as large numbers of agents are typically required to serve high call volumes. With customer service becoming a major competitive battleground, ensuring customer’s requests can be met quickly and effectively is now commercially paramount.

The Problem

One of the biggest challenges facing utility companies today is the continued consolidation within this market and the need to identify the most efficient and customer friendly way to handle a high number of routine call types for a multitude of different service offerings, under different brands. These include payment calls, meter readings, changes of address and, perhaps even more challenging, calls resulting from outages within certain regions. Such an occurrence frequently causes a flood of calls that, due to its unpredictable nature, can be almost impossible to handle.

The weekly ‘Friday peaks’, where house movers wish to contact their utility companies to register or update their details, present another major issue. Where callers are unable to make contact simply to become a customer, their perception of the utility company can be severely damaged. No organisation would willingly start a customer relationship on such a glaringly obvious ‘wrong foot’.

How xPress™ can help

Automation is a simple and increasingly low-cost method of handling routine call types, allowing skilled agent resources to be concentrated on both in-depth customer queries where live interaction is key to maintaining high levels of customer service and on revenue generating opportunities.

This not only frees up agent resources for other tasks, but also enables callers who simply wish to perform a simple task (such as registering a meter reading or changing their address details) to be answered immediately, in turn reducing queue times for callers with more complex queries.

xPress™ enables self-service speech-enabled applications to be created quickly and efficiently, reducing the strain on call centres and ensuring that simple call types can be handled in the shortest possible timeframe and using minimum resources. And services can be modified and adapted quickly and easily, even by non-technical staff: A utility company no longer needs to consult a speech application expert to implement a change in a voice prompt – day-to-day changes can be made ‘on-the-fly’ from the desktop.

xPress™ solutions can be implemented across a variety of technology platforms: even the mixed platform environments that is increasingly common as a result of mergers and acquisitions don’t represent a challenge. xPress’s platform independence means that investment in applications is further protected over time, as they can be migrated in line with platform changes.

Vicorp xPress™ speech solutions

xPress™ addresses the issues of intelligently managing a client and providing pertinent information in any format at the right time and place, enabling organisations to build a relationship whose qualities are experienced each time a client makes contact.

Vicorp deliver an end-to-end solution that enables organisations to address their voice services in a complete manner. Vicorp also works with a number of partners across the globe to deliver the same level of quality worldwide.

Vicorp uses its own highly advanced development tools and platforms to deliver voice services and solutions: its xMP product suite is the leading independent Service Creation environment available in the market.

Vicorp provides all the tools and a runtime framework for assembling, deploying, delivering and managing dynamic communication services. Single and multi-channel application environments are available that strongly support Service Creation, reuse, development and extension by non-technical people. Vicorp also builds sample services, prototypes, proof of concept services and full production services to any scale, running on any infrastructure.