The CS Conference has dropped the “I” from its name but instead of less information more will be provided for the utility professionals who attend CS Week from all around the globe, looking for the latest on customer service.
 More than 1,500 utility professionals met in Orlando, Fla., for CS Week 2007. In 1990, CIS Conference 14 was also held in Orlando; attendees numbered 300. (EL&P photo) |
CIS Week’s educational offerings included the “Revenue Lifecycle.” Now, with the new expansion, CS Week will address the “Customer Experience Lifecycle,” expanding to encompass all business processes, meter-to-cash. CS Week will cover every area of direct or indirect interaction between the customer and the utility with expanded coverage of the latest research on AMI/MDM, field management issues, marketing, conservation and call center topics.
This year’s conference saw record attendance in all venues and events. In 1990, CIS Conference 14 was also held in Orlando, but while that conference served 300, CS Week 2007 hosted more than 1,500 attendees. They worked their way through 55-plus workshops and 100 speakers. Keynotes included James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, and John Ramil, president and COO of TECO. One of the high points of the event was the announcement of the winners of the first Expanding Excellence Awards for outstanding achievements in customer service.
Workshops
Presentations covered all the topics that are top-of-mind for customer service utility professionals. Should they replace their CIS? Could they use an out-of-the-box solution? Should they outsource? What about meter data management? What are the best practices for managing collections?
The Long Island Power Authority, for instance, found that its legacy CIS “works, but it’s costly to work on.” For LIPA, replacing was not an option-they wanted an out of the box solution, and went with the Siebel umbrella. We Energies reported on progress the company had made since last year, when they gave a presentation on bad debt and collections. Now the company is leveraging risk-based scoring and managing call center contact more predictably. Case histories from other utilities covered low income programs, improving efficiency in customer service, and pre-pay programs, just to name a few.
The Executive Summit, an invitation-only two-day discussion for CIS executives, provided a inside look at their main concerns. Top items on their list included AMI, work force transition, cyber security and outsourcing. Presentors came from companies that cut across the whole industry-from NSTAR, Duke and Oncor, to the Bank of America-and covered diverse topics, like merger lessons learned, securing non-public personal information, and reducing revenue losses.
Winners of the Expanding Excellence Awards
Winners of the first Expanding Excellence awards were announced at CS Week. The Expanding Excellence Awards were designed to recognize excellence in customer service. The Expanding Excellence Program honors utilities in three categories-Best CIS Implementation, Innovation in Extending a Legacy System and Innovation in Customer Service. Two awards are given in each category, Level I for utilities with gross revenues above $400 million, and Level II for utilities with gross revenues below $400 million.
Exelon Corporation won the Best CIS Implementation Award, Level I, for its success in standardizing processes and consolidating systems to achieve operational efficiencies. By moving to a common customer system, all meter-to-cash functions could operate on the same platform across ComEd and PECO, setting the stage for future growth opportunities. Part of the process required retiring legacy applications that were more than 30-years old, but the project still took only two years to complete. Three months after go-live in October 2006, nearly all operating areas were back to pre-conversion performance levels. According to company representatives, guiding principles for Exelon included “move then improve,” which set the stage to standardize processes across companies and reduce implementation risk in the project by limiting the amount of system changes necessary, and, “It’s a journey, not an event.”
 |
The Level II Best CIS Implementation Award went to Baldwin County Electric Membership Corporation. Baldwin’s guiding principle was that “a small utility can accomplish big things through CIS.” According to Baldwin, the completion of this project has allowed a small utility that had difficulty living up to the new technological demands of customers to be on the leading edge of customer service technology.
Baldwin started with software that functioned, in most respects, as it had in 1985. One of the distinguishing features of this project was the commitment of the employees to develop and attain a vision for the operations of the cooperative while dealing with five tropical systems hitting its service area. By making an outstanding team effort through every phase of the implementation, Baldwin’s project was completed one month ahead of schedule, 14 percent underbudget and has achieved a 97 percent customer rating. Now Baldwin provides more information online to its customers, has automated its collections system, provided executive dashboards on key service metrics, and continues to see incremental improvements.
The Innovation in Extending a Legacy System, Level I, was awarded to Kansas City Power & Light for its thematic mapping solutions. KCP&L extended the usefulness of its AM/FM system to display CIS data in thematic maps that illustrate and depict solutions to business questions in a format other than tabular data. KCP&L displays easy to understand products that extend the usefulness of the CIS data via static and interactive programs. The map displays provided by these projects have enabled various departments to present information or manage projects more efficiently. This technology was not readily available to the user community in the past and each project has expanded the thinking of KCP&L users.
The Jackson Energy Authority won the Level II Innovation in Extending a Legacy System for its Viryanet mobile dispatch integration with Alliance ECIS. The JEA showed continued perseverance extending its legacy system, overcoming complex obstacles and exceeding customer expectations while lowering the cost of the field service operating component with mobile data dispatch software.
Parts of this project, according to JEA representatives, could be the basis of a textbook on how not to run a project. Starting with a conflict between JEA and G.E., problems included little internal commitment to the project and the human response to change: the “guys in the field” weren’t used to computers in their trucks. Shortly after implementation, the project was considered a failure and was scheduled to be dismantled, but then it was determined that although the forecasted ROI would never be achieved, the benefits of maintaining the capabilities provided by the Viryanet software outweighed the cost of stranding the investment.
JEA turned failure around. Now the Authority has added 1,000 service orders a month, given customers a 2-hour appointment window, and increased employee moral. “You can’t take the computers away from [field workers] now.” JEA is now better managing its workforce and plans for FY08 include the GPS tracking of all valuable field resources that will enable more effective use of equipment during emergency operations.
NSTAR Electric and Gas Corporation won the Innovation in Customer Service Award, Level I, for re-engineering its customers’ IVR experience. NSTAR’s integrated voice response re-engineering initiative, which implemented a natural language understanding IVR, came in under budget, ahead of schedule and surpassed customer expectations regarding use and acceptance. NSTAR undertook the re-engineering initiative because the company trailed utility averages. The new menu is 5 seconds long and most transactions take less than 8 seconds, and opting-out to a CSR is an option. An 8-year payback was the original estimate but the company is now on track to a 3-year payback.
Innovation in Customer Service, Level II, was awarded to Shelby Electric Cooperative, for initiating a program to market propane-fueled automatic standby generators to its members that enabled a demand management program. This program brought the cooperative local, regional and national media attention and has peaked the interest of other electric cooperatives. For every 100 generators installed, the cooperative can increase peak demand control by approximately 1 MW. Each 1 MW of controlled demand, if properly managed, should result in approximately $50,000 in annual power cost savings. The result: a 14.8 percent rate decrease for co-op members and the ability to control demand in the residential market, the hardest one to penetrate. From these savings, the cooperative can fund rate reductions for participating members, add to overall system- wide rate stability and fund the marketing programs required to ensure project success. 
