Top 11 Features in a Contact Center Solution for Utility Companies

Enghouse explores key features utility companies should look for in a cloud-based contact centre solution to deliver excellent customer service.

When Hurricane Ida struck New Orleans in 2021, outdated technology caused 911 call centres to go offline for 13 hours, leaving thousands without emergency services.

This raises a critical question: Can utility companies afford their contact centres to fail during emergencies?

Absolutely not. Customers expect reliable communication and superior service from utilities, making a resilient contact centre essential.

Cloud-based contact centres are the ideal choice, offering the needed resilience, redundancy, and disaster recovery to weather the storm during crises.

But how do you choose the right solution?

11 Features Utilities Should Seek in a Cloud-Based Contact Centre Solution

Resilience is vital, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. To deliver a superior service experience, utility companies should look for these eleven key features in a cloud-based contact centre solution:

• Resilience
• Omnichannel Communication
• Third-Party Integrations
• Comprehensive Quality Management and Evaluation
• Proactive Outbound Communication
• AI-Powered Self-Service Options
• Intelligent Routing
• Scalability
• Compliance
• Call Recordings
• Intuitive and User-Friendly Agent Interface

1. Resilience

For a utility company, staying operational during catastrophic events is essential. In times of crisis, customers rely on utilities for timely information and support, making a resilient contact center essential. Cloud-based contact center solutions shine here, offering unmatched resilience and business continuity.

Cloud-based solutions enable agents to stay connected to their contact centre applications from any location with Internet access.

This ensures uninterrupted customer service even if local infrastructure gets compromised during outages or disasters.

Cloud-based systems also come equipped with auto-failover capabilities and redundant data centres, ensuring continuous connectivity.

They leverage multiple data centres strategically located in different geographic regions, automatically syncing and duplicating data and services.

If one data centre goes offline, another can seamlessly take over, maintaining connectivity and performance.

In critical situations, a cloud-based contact centre’s robust performance and high availability ensure customer responsiveness, minimizing customer frustration. They also ensure that utilities stay reachable to deliver services, irrespective of the extent of the situation.

2. Omnichannel Communication

Omnichannel communication delivers an engaging customer experience by offering all the communication channels customers now expect – voice, email, chat, social media, and SMS – into a single platform.

For example, if a customer reports an internet outage via phone, a telecom company can promptly log the complaint and follow up with an SMS or WhatsApp message.

This message would update the customer that a technician is on the way, along with an estimated arrival time. Additionally, for scenarios such as maintenance or line issues, the customer can be informed via an outbound communications solution about the cause of the outage and the expected time for resolution.

For issues like billing errors or connection transfer requests, customers might choose to communicate via email, chat, or voice calls based on their preference.

Omnichannel communication offers convenience and empowers customers by allowing them to choose their preferred interaction channel, making them feel valued and listened to at every touchpoint.

Moreover, access to customers’ past interactions across channels enables agents to resolve queries more efficiently, streamlining operations, reducing resolution times, and boosting overall productivity.

3. Third-Party Integrations

According to a Salesforce report, 56% of customers have to repeat or re-explain their queries to multiple agents, which can be frustrating.

CRM-equipped contact centre solutions can mitigate this issue by seamlessly integrating with third-party systems, ensuring agents have immediate access to the correct information, even when calls are transferred between agents.

If a customer contacts a water utility about inadequate water supply, integrated CRM and CIS systems in a cloud-based solution can provide the agent with necessary details like the customer’s address, plan, usage, and billing information. This streamlined access facilitates faster and more accurate query resolution.

Beyond CRM systems, open-standards-based contact centres can integrate with various other applications.

These include support systems, issue tracking systems, unified communications platforms for company-wide collaboration, and analytics and reporting tools.

These integrations ensure that all aspects of customer service are connected, streamlining operations and enhancing overall efficiency.

4. Comprehensive Quality Management and Evaluation

For utility companies, consistently delivering high service standards is essential to building and improving customer trust.

By leveraging quality management tools with multi-channel interaction and screen recordings, utility companies can ensure that customer interactions follow the proper approach (scripted calls, confirmations, validations, etc.) and that all interactions are respectful and professional.

Automated evaluation tools ensure that all agent interactions, not just random samples or flagged interactions, are uniformly scored using the same criteria and consistently applied, eliminating agent fear of bias without needing additional supervisory resources.

5. Proactive Outbound Communication

According to the J.D. Power Customer Satisfaction Study, customers who received timely outage updates from their electric utility reported higher satisfaction than those who didn’t.

Contact centre solutions should enable utility companies to proactively inform customers about maintenance, disruptions (e.g., hurricane warnings or power outages), payment reminders, and company initiatives.

While running an energy-efficiency campaign, utilities can reach out via SMS or email, encouraging participation.

Using proactive engagement keeps customers informed about critical issues and updates, reducing inbound calls, website overload, and negative comments across social media platforms. It also helps ensure customers are informed when and how they expect to be.

6. AI-Powered Self-Service Options

Utility companies’ contact centres handle many routine inquiries, such as setting up new customer accounts, processing maintenance requests, and addressing payment-related concerns.

Contact centre solutions can streamline routine processes by offering AI-powered self-service tools like chatbots, virtual assistants, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

By integrating a comprehensive knowledge base, customers can quickly find solutions themselves via the self-service application, freeing up agents to focus on more complex issues.

AI-powered virtual agents require cloud infrastructure to ensure the latest capabilities can be offered as soon as they are released, the latest security updates can be instantaneously rolled out, and more advanced support can be offered, further enhancing customer interactions’ efficiency and effectiveness.

Whenever the customer cannot fully resolve the issue using the self-service options, the system can immediately route the call to the most appropriate agent equipped to handle the specific query.

7. Intelligent Routing

Utility contact centres manage various inquiries, making it crucial to connect customers with the right agents quickly.

Intelligent routing automatically directs calls to the most suitable agent or department based on the nature of the inquiry – whether it’s a billing concern or a service outage report. This reduces the need for call transfers and improves first-contact resolution rates.

Intelligent routing also optimizes queue management by considering agent availability, reducing wait times, and enhancing the overall customer experience.

By ensuring each inquiry is efficiently handled, utility companies can improve service quality and operational efficiency.

8. Scalability

Utility companies often experience a surge in call volumes during emergencies such as natural disasters, power outages, extreme weather, or other catastrophic events.

For instance, during the Texas winter storm in 2021, 4900 water pipelines burst throughout Houston. The utility responsible for water distribution, which typically received fewer than 20 calls a day, was flooded with over 10,000 calls in a single day.

These situations are common during crises, making scalability a critical factor in maintaining operational efficiency.

Cloud-based contact centre solutions offer the agility and flexibility to handle emergency-related surges. These solutions allow you to rapidly adjust seat capacity without overwhelming the system, regardless of your agents’ location – whether on-site or working remotely.

This flexibility ensures that your contact centre can provide timely and reliable customer support during critical times.

9. Compliance

Compliance is essential for utility companies’ contact centres to adhere to legal and regulatory standards, protect customer information, and mitigate operational risk.

Most cloud-based contact centre solutions offer the option for extensive compliance features, helping utility companies adhere to standards like PCI-DSS, which is mandatory for handling payment card information.

With an increasing number of data security issues, companies need to increase their capabilities to protect highly valuable customer data such as social security numbers, payment details, and addresses.

Without a strong focus on compliance measures, this could lead to severe consequences, including lawsuits, financial losses, and increased regulatory scrutiny.

10. Call Recordings

Like every industry that deals with sensitive public information, Utility companies must record calls and digital interactions to comply with industry-specific regulatory and privacy requirements.

Beyond compliance, call recordings are invaluable for confirmation of customer requests, issue reporting/tracking/resolution, quality assurance, evaluating agent performance, and providing targeted coaching.

In disputes, such as a customer contesting a bill, claiming they were charged more than agreed upon previously, call and screen recordings serve as reliable records of interactions, helping resolve conflicts fairly and efficiently.

Recording solutions can provide off-site secure storage for all types of recordings, extended storage capacity, indexing, keyword/phrase search, call encryption, and time-stamping to simplify providing objective proof of customer directives while ensuring easy access and retrieval for as long as an organization requires.

11. Intuitive and User-Friendly Agent Interface

While the previous features are crucial for a utility contact centre, an intuitive and user-friendly agent interface is an absolute requirement – driven by the pervasive use of always-on, highly intuitive, and engaging mobile apps.

An intuitive interface allows agents to navigate the system with minimal training. It provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions across various channels, enabling swift issue resolution.

For supervisors, a user-friendly interface simplifies team management by offering clear visibility into team members’ statuses and operational oversight. This simplifies day-to-day tasks and contributes to improved service delivery and customer satisfaction.

Beyond the essentials, features like universal queuing and leveraging emerging technologies such as AI and biometrics are also worth considering.

When selecting a contact centre solution, it’s crucial to focus on solutions that ensure exceptional customer service.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Enghouse Interactive – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Enghouse Interactive
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson