Taking advantage of the advances in IT, most power utilities have established call centres to ensure round the clock interaction with the customers(Fig.).
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| A Typical Call Centre |
Today call centres have become essential to the marketing and customer carestrategies of many businesses. It is imperative that one should have a good call centre to provide the service that a customer expects. A utility has to develop a customer service strategy that successfully balances costs,generates revenues, and quality. Only then can companies transform their call-centres into strategic assets that provide a competitive advantage and promote growth apart from giving customer the satisfaction they deserve.
The call centre is often the largest component of utility cost-to-serve. For the companies to get the most from their call centres, they should take care of three aspects:
1. They have to define a customer service strategy that goes beyond merely providing good service at low cost and should look into the quality aspect.
2. To deliver their strategy, they have to develop an infrastructure that uses outsourcing and technology in an optimum balanced way.
3. They have to ensure the best possible execution by their agents in all interactions with customers by investing time and resources in training their personnel in all the current systems in the company and make them performance oriented.
High-volume, call centre applications provide a logical sequence of information that solves the problem of inconsistent and redundant screen flow. These applications pull customer data from disparate back-end systems and present it to the client in a Windows, HTML or Macromedia Flash environment. This composite application eliminates the need for customer service representatives to laboriously access dozens of screens of information, one by one, to answer a customer inquiry-service. CSRs can now access all the customer information they need with just a few mouse clicks.
Benefits of such composite computer systems include the following:
• optimization of each interaction with immediate access to comprehensive customer information – from any system(s) while leveraging existing legacy assets;
• significantly reducing training time for permanent and seasonal customer service representatives;
• enabling consistent customer service across all communication channels, including telephone, the web, email, fax, text-based chat, and voice over IP;
• reducing training costs by up to 75% when old green screen terminal windows are converted to an intelligent graphical user interface;
• reducing average call handling time by 10 to 20%;
• increasing service sales by 40%; and
• reduction in hand-offs and call transfers by 35%.
How a Call Centre Works and Helps in Handling Complaints
A consumer calls a number publicised by the utility and this is transferred to one of the agents of the call centre. The number of agents would depend on the seat requirement of the company. This agent becomes the representative of the company and records all the requirements and transactions with the customer. The system used by the agent is integrated with the CRM of theorganisation and the agent would have all the updated information in the company. Thus without coming to the office of the company, the customer can interact with the company. The call centre is used to take calls as well as to make calls to the consumer to keep him/her updated.
CRM and Call Centre Integration
This is perhaps the most important aspect which determines the success of any call centre. A call centre should not function in isolation but work in integration with the company so that a solution to a consumer’s problem is immediate and the situation is also escalated/ known to all in the company.Apart from these centres, there are other touch points wherein the customer interacts with the organisation. These are coordinated by the centres of that particular district/geography or are centrally controlled. Some of the key touch points for a utility are mentioned below:
Other Customer Touch Points
There are normally three types of touch points (points where the customer is touched'
Online Personal – Face-to-face interaction with customer.
The call centre is often the largest component of utility cost-to-serve. For the companies to get the most from their call centres, they should take care of three aspects:
1. They have to define a customer service strategy that goes beyond merely providing good service at low cost and should look into the quality aspect.
2. To deliver their strategy, they have to develop an infrastructure that uses outsourcing and technology in an optimum balanced way.
3. They have to ensure the best possible execution by their agents in all interactions with customers by investing time and resources in training their personnel in all the current systems in the company and make them performance oriented.
High-volume, call centre applications provide a logical sequence of information that solves the problem of inconsistent and redundant screen flow. These applications pull customer data from disparate back-end systems and present it to the client in a Windows, HTML or Macromedia Flash environment. This composite application eliminates the need for customer service representatives to laboriously access dozens of screens of information, one by one, to answer a customer inquiry-service. CSRs can now access all the customer information they need with just a few mouse clicks.
Benefits of such composite computer systems include the following:
• optimization of each interaction with immediate access to comprehensive customer information – from any system(s) while leveraging existing legacy assets;
• significantly reducing training time for permanent and seasonal customer service representatives;
• enabling consistent customer service across all communication channels, including telephone, the web, email, fax, text-based chat, and voice over IP;
• reducing training costs by up to 75% when old green screen terminal windows are converted to an intelligent graphical user interface;
• reducing average call handling time by 10 to 20%;
• increasing service sales by 40%; and
• reduction in hand-offs and call transfers by 35%.
How a Call Centre Works and Helps in Handling Complaints
A consumer calls a number publicised by the utility and this is transferred to one of the agents of the call centre. The number of agents would depend on the seat requirement of the company. This agent becomes the representative of the company and records all the requirements and transactions with the customer. The system used by the agent is integrated with the CRM of theorganisation and the agent would have all the updated information in the company. Thus without coming to the office of the company, the customer can interact with the company. The call centre is used to take calls as well as to make calls to the consumer to keep him/her updated.
CRM and Call Centre Integration
This is perhaps the most important aspect which determines the success of any call centre. A call centre should not function in isolation but work in integration with the company so that a solution to a consumer’s problem is immediate and the situation is also escalated/ known to all in the company.Apart from these centres, there are other touch points wherein the customer interacts with the organisation. These are coordinated by the centres of that particular district/geography or are centrally controlled. Some of the key touch points for a utility are mentioned below:
Other Customer Touch Points
There are normally three types of touch points (points where the customer is touched'
Online Personal – Face-to-face interaction with customer.
Offline Indirect – No direct interaction with customer.
Online Remote – Customer contact over phone/voice (Fig).
Online Remote – Customer contact over phone/voice (Fig).
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| SMS based Fault Management System |
It is very important that there is uniformity in the quality of service, ambience and delivery of service across the organisation to ensure that the customer experience is a pleasant one.
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