5 Signs You Need to Improve Your Utility's Customer Service Experience
It’s no doubt you and your team are busy. From the time you open your doors until the last person leaves, you don’t have enough hours in the day. And each day, you and your team strive to provide exceptional customer experiences. But how do you know the level of service you’re providing your community is enough? Below are 5 signs you need to improve your utility’s customer service experience.
Your current staff can’t keep up with customer inquiries, issues, and complaints.
You’re struggling to keep track of customer communications.
You’re looking for ways to be more productive or make better decisions.
Your customers want more ways to interact with your team.
You want to make it easy for your utility customers to self-serve.
1. Your current staff can’t keep up with customer inquiries, issues, and complaints.
The services you provide are essential to your community’s comfort. No one wants their services interrupted, but if they do have an issue, your community members don’t want to wait in line too long to get a matter resolved.
If your current staff can’t keep up with customer inquiries, issues, and complaints, and you must add more people to get the job done, it’s time to improve your utility’s customer service experience. But how do you do that? You need your staff to perform other high-priority tasks, you may not have the budget to add more staff, and you certainly can’t add more hours in the day. Maybe it’s not your staff, but your software that’s the problem.
2. You’re struggling to keep track of customer communications.
Customer Information Systems (CIS) are meter-to-cash software ecosystems that track all interactions with your community. And when they work well, you have a valuable resource. But when your software doesn’t integrate well, is outdated, or has a poor UI/UX, it can make it harder for your team to do its job effectively.
In today’s economy, we are all trying to do more with less, and our software needs to work harder than ever. So if your CIS makes it difficult for your staff to do their jobs, you need a different software. CIS software that takes several clicks to find what you need, does not have global search, and is not tightly integrated with other best-of-breed software makes it harder for your team to track communications, complete billing cycles, and serve your community. But when you have a CIS with an intuitive user interface, guided workflows, and an automation engine that automates repetitive tasks, you have software that helps you do more with less.
3. You’re looking for ways to be more productive or make better decisions.
Before the most recent technology boom, companies had more difficulty collecting and analyzing data than today. Many didn’t know that all touchpoints could provide such valuable information. A robust meter-to-cash ecosystem allows you to track your customer interactions and provides excellent data to help you and your team make better decisions.
Now we all get a feel for what we do. We can sense when the office is filled with tension. And we can see the patterns and predict with some degree of certainty that changes need to be made. But when you analyze the data your CIS/UB system collects, your team can find ways to be more productive and make better decisions than you could with instinct alone.
4. Your customers want more ways to interact with your team
Today’s technology is also changing the way utilities serve their customers. Almost everyone has at least one digital device to interact with the world. And more businesses are finding ways to use digital means to interact with customers: e-stores, chatbots, IVR, text messaging, and even video engagement.
Text is fine for most communications, but personalized video offers much more. Using video engagement software like SmartVx to share billing information with your customers, you reach and compel your community to act. Signing up for paperless billing, sharing changes to utility bills, and even encouraging your community to use your online web portal are much more manageable. Video provides information in an easy-to-digest format for a larger audience than text-based communication. And software like SmartVx delivers relevant data to help your team determine how effective your messaging is.
5. You want to make it easy for your utility customers to self-serve.
Today communities need to do more with less, and technology is providing a means for utilities to do just that. Websites and portals help get important information to customers, and now they’re a must-have.
Many online utility portals exist, but not all have an intuitive interface allowing customers to take charge of their accounts. With SilverBlaze, your team gains a pair of hands with rolled-up sleeves, ready to serve your customer anytime, anywhere, and on any device. With SilverBlaze, you not only open up an opportunity for your customers to self-serve, but you also give them the ability to take charge of their accounts and manage their consumptions. With its intuitive design and easy-to-read charts and graphs, your community will have everything it needs to serve itself, making everyone first in line every time.
If you recognize these 5 signs, then it’s time to review your meter-to-cash ecosystem to see if it’s the best fit for your community. Contact our knowledgeable sales team if you and your team determine it’s time to update your CIS/UB. They’ll show you why a best-of-breed, multichannel ecosystem like NorthStar is the right choice for your community.