While utilities often get a bad rap for one thing or another, at least one is taking steps to improve its customer service and customer care procedures.
One of Alaska’s oldest energy companies, ENSTAR Natural Gas revealed today that it has chosen Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing as well as Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence in a move to not only better understand its customers’ needs to enhance its billing capabilities and the customer service it offers.
Colleen Starring, president of ENSTAR Natural Gas, explained, “In order to support our continued growth, ENSTAR requires a billing application to better serve our customer base.”
With Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, ENSTAR hopes to gain a complete view of its customer data. In addition, with this solution it anticipates that it will be able to streamline its billing and at the same time provide more responsive customer service. By more responsive service, the utility believes it will now be able to cut down on the factors that lead to call abandonment including wait time and average handle time. It believes also believes the solution will help reduce CSR (customer service representative) training time.
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing will provide ENSTAR Natural Gas with the ability to manage the complete lifecycle of its customers, encompassing service connection, meter read management, complex billing, payment processing and debt collection. It also plans to integrate this solution with its existing Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management application. The company said this will enable it “to improve communication between customer service representatives, dispatchers and technicians – which should boost workforce productivity and reduce operating expenses while helping eliminate missed appointments, service backlogs and overtime costs.”
At the same time, ENSTAR Natural Gas is deploying Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence in an effort to more easily organize consistent, relevant and timely data from across its enterprise to rationalize consumption and payment collection trends into enterprise reports. The company says the reports will provide its management with a holistic view of the current status of customers, payment collections and workload to improve decision making.
“We are committed to helping ENSTAR Natural Gas realize new efficiencies and cost savings through integrated systems and effective management of valuable customer relationships. Oracle Utilities will help harness a complete view of customer data, streamline billing processes and enable more responsive customer service,” said Bill Vellante, group vice president and general manager of Oracle Utilities.
In other news, ContactCenterSolutions reported, “In the widely reported nearly year-old legal battle between Oracle and Google, a claim for $1.4 billion that could rise to as much as $6.1 billion in damages, is apparently too much in regard to Oracle’s suit that accuses Google of infringing on its Java patents with the Android smartphone operating system.”
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