Top Tools You Need to Enhance Utility Customer Self-Service
The digital transformation is changing the way we interact with our utility customers. Instead of a break-fix approach, your utility customers expect a proactive experience that allows them to serve themselves online at a convenient time and place. When you have the right online tools, your customers can help themselves, and your team has a digital helper, keeping on top of routine tasks like payments, account management, and move-ins and move-outs. What tools do you need to provide utility customer self-service? Here’s a list of the top five must-have tools that will enhance your community’s ability to self-serve.
Utility Customer Self-Serve Portal
Customer Information and Utility Billing System
Smart Forms and Work Flows
Notifications
Consumption Management
Utility Customer Self-Service Portal
For your customers to access their accounts online, you need a self-serve portal like SilverBlaze. With SilverBlaze, customers have a way to log in and manage their accounts, and they can do so at a time and in a place that is convenient for them. When they do have access to their accounts, they can
update account information,
make payments,
monitor transactions,
view account history,
receive alerts and notifications
and even manage their consumption.
When your customers use utility customer self-service, they can perform all the tasks above on their own without having to call, email, or visit your office staff. Because your customers can help themselves, it frees up your team to perform other high-priority tasks, streamlining operations and maximizing operational efficiencies.
Customer Information and Utility Billing System
When you pair a customer self-serve portal with a customer information system like NorthStar, you improve how your team communicates with your community. SilverBlaze is the portal that helps customers manage their accounts, and NorthStar is the software that allows your team to manage your customer relationships. When these two tools are integrated, you have a seamless interchange of information between the two platforms that gives your customers direct access to their accounts. And your team has a way to manage your customers’ online interactions. With these two tools in place, you have a dynamic, proactive customer experience that puts every person in your community first in line every time they interact with your team.
Smart Forms and Work Flows
SilverBlaze’s Smart Forms and Work Flows allow you to configure the utility customer self-serve portal to provide exceptional customer experiences online. With SilverBlaze Smart Forms and Work Flows working for you, you have a seamless, automated way to collect, process, and respond to customer questions. Because customers can serve themselves and your staff can respond to questions as they are entered into the system, you can reduce customer wait times and your teams’ workload, improving customer and staff interactions and the overall customer experience.
Notifications
Transparent outage reporting increases customer satisfaction and reduces the chance of negative publicity. Because we live in a digital age, your customers want to be notified digitally. If they don’t receive notifications from you, they’ll get them from somewhere, often from social media. Many utilities have seen what can happen when a social media storm hits, and they can tell you that being proactive and alerting customers before, during, and after an outage is much better than dealing with negative publicity. When the power goes out or the water stops flowing, your customers need and want to know what’s happening. With a notification system in place, you can send customer alerts about planned and unplanned outages with consistent, up-to-date information.
Consumption Management
Decarbonization, consumption management, and grid stability are on everyone’s minds today. With the rising prices of fuel and increasing environmental awareness, families are looking for ways to save money and reduce their energy consumption. One way to do that is to monitor their energy consumption on a utility customer service portal. When customers have access to historical data, they can see patterns in their usage and change how and when they use electricity and water. With a tool like SilverBlaze and NorthStar, your customers can chart their consumption over time and see if the changes they make are positively affecting their bills.
When customers are aware of their consumption, they are more likely to use their utilities during off-peak hours because it saves them money. As NorthStar and SilverBlaze collect data, your team can study the data to learn more about how your community consumes water and electricity. Knowing your community’s consumption patterns helps you make informed decisions about your infrastructure to have the resources needed during on-peak and off-peak times.
When you have these five utility customer self-service tools in place, you and your team can provide better customer experiences for your community. The digital transformation has shown us all a way to serve our communities better, and you owe it to yourself and your communities to take advantage of these tools. When you do, you can provide a better customer experience for your customers, and you can improve operational efficiencies, saving time and money.
Ready to improve customer experiences and save time and money with these tools? Contact our sales team to learn how to use NorthStar CIS and SilverBlaze to maximize your team’s efficiency.