Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 26 | Page 63

CASE STUDY A highly featured debt management process was set-up to effectively manage defaulting customers’ overdue bills and keep customers well informed about the overdue payments through multiple communication channels like letters, emails and SMS etc. Appropriate reports were developed on collection management to keep managers informed about the collection status and outstanding debt, based on different customer categories. All these resulted in improving the collection process by introducing an effective collection management system and thereby reducing the outstanding debt from the subscribers to the minimum. Required interfaces were also developed to share data seamlessly across systems with necessary security and validations. This helped the business in reducing the manual intervention and interrogation of data and there by achieving improved data quality and reliability. Several online payment channels were opened to the customers to facilitate payments at a convenient time of day. Customers were given options to make online payments via portals, banks, kiosks and other government web sites. The CC& B Solution was integrated with external applications for both the distribution companies. National ID, and Government sites were successfully implemented to manage customer services efficiently. All these applications were developed using the latest technologies on .Net and Sharepoint with supporting back- end technology components from the Oracle Corporation. A state-of-the-art 24/7 call centre was set-up with access to online ‘360 degree’ customer data, facilitating service centre staff to effectively communicate with customers with the very latest information. The call centre staff were able to provide the right information to their customers and resolve their queries on time over a phone in the majority of cases. www.intelligentcio.com management of customer services was also operated more efficiently. The set-up of 20 bill cycles and accounts were operationally divided into different bill cycles, resulting in a proper and balanced distribution of work load in terms of meter reading, generating, printing and dispatch of bills. The system created a significant increase in revenue as the billing system was able to generate and dispatch bills for all utility customers on time. The work done by the field operations staff was greatly benefited by the distribution of the metre read routes and aligning them with bill cycles to ensure that bills are produced with correct readings and bill amounts. This contributed to significant improvements in terms of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. As a result of the system there has been a reduced number of customer visits to the branches for basic services because of the state-of the-art 24/7 call centre and enhanced customer service and business operations – which has been termed a ‘One Stop Shop’ for customer services. Benefits The system has been configured easily to meet unique needs, minimising customisations across 25 branches in Al Ain and Abu Dhabi regions and scaling from a few thousand customers to many millions. The system successfully implemented the first Arabised version of a Customer Care and Billing System in the region – with the Arabisation of all fields and labels. It has enabled 1280 staff to deliver superior customer service through its 45 stores and supported prebuilt integrations in the Oracle Utilities suite. The change management process was also successfully managed. Cohesion between processes was improved and processing time for customer services reduced. The The system also has an intuitive user interface and automated workflow and processes resulting in less time being taken from the billing process to bills being paid. n THE SYSTEM SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED THE FIRST ARABISED VERSION OF A CUSTOMER CARE AND BILLING SYSTEM IN THE REGION. INTELLIGENTCIO 63