vuluntito: Customer spotlight: Energy retailer keeps customers happy with ...

Electric By Precise

Experts predict that this summer will be the hottest on record, even following the sizzling heat of 2011 with record temperatures in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. For many U.S. energy companies, the recession has had little impact on demand. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), energy consumption in the United States will increase 0.3% annually from 2010 through 2035, as cited in a recent report on the utility industry from Zacks Equity Research. ?The utilities have to constantly meet the high expectations of its wide customer base, adapt to a changing global economic scenario, and upgrade technologies to meet stringent environmental norms,? the report?s author states.

There?s plenty of opportunity for utilities today to make a difference, through offerings competitive pricing and energy-efficient solutions to savvy customers. One Southern energy company understands the tricky balance between operations and customer satisfaction, after experiencing issues with its core applications in the summer of 2011.

The company, a market-leading retail electricity provider, hangs its hat on delivering superior customer service to millions of residential and business customers. Its customers depend upon round-the-clock support with knowledgeable agents and rich self-service and chat capabilities on its website and through an interactive automated call center. Through these vehicles, individuals can not only manage their accounts, pay bills and change their plans but can also access pertinent information about their energy usage. The company provides advice to help consumers save money and make smart energy decisions.

It?s critical that the company consistently provide comprehensive self-service functionality to users; if these functions are slow, customers and prospects contact the call centers, which drives up staffing costs. The company maintains SAP Utilities Industry Solution (ISU) and SAP CRM coupled with a .NET-based Web infrastructure. This means that customer and agent-facing services depend on multiple components to provide information and process transactions.

Last summer, there were intermittent systems slowdowns of these core applications, which threatened the electricity retailer?s high service-level objectives. This meant periodic poor response times for call-center agents and customers trying to do business on its website. Worse, the system could even lock customers out of their accounts altogether.

The inefficiencies of ?horizontal? systems management

As at many large companies, the IT organization was using several point solutions to manage its multi-technology environment consisting of SAP, internally-built Web apps, Oracle, various operating systems, servers and the network. This ?horizontal? layer approach to systems management provided volumes of data, but trying to correlate events to identify a root cause was difficult and ultimately, didn?t work. This caused long delays in identifying and fixing application issues. Too often, IT was applying fixes that were based on a hunch.

The IT organization mobilized to fix the problem and avoid the service level exposures in the future. As a result, IT identified the need for a comprehensive Application Performance Management (APM) system to discover the root causes and provide appropriate solutions. Based on previous experience, Precise was selected for a Proof of Concept (POC) to highlight the hotspots that the existing tools were missing.

The POC in September 2011 included monitoring the Web, SAP, J2EE, Oracle, MS SQL and numerous infrastructure components. Almost immediately, TXU uncovered several performance issues, which IT resolved with Oracle tuning based on the insights of how the problematic transactions were accessing the data. Similarly, Precise identified specific transactions that were inefficiently accessing the data, and provided a corrective recommendation.

As the issues were quickly identified and resolved, the system became more stable. This allowed IT to focus on application tuning instead of throwing money at hardware upgrades.

While performance management is an ongoing exercise at the company, the incidents of inconsistent or unacceptable service levels have dramatically declined and the overall system service level is much more reliable today. Based on these positive outcomes, the energy retailer?s parent company is now also using Precise as they upgrade their applications.

?Being able to provide rapid transaction functionality from the website and our IVR system helps keep us responsive to customers and keeps our costs low at same time,? remarked the IT manager involved with the Precise deployment. ?We don?t generate the power or distribute the power; our only business is selling energy, so customer service is our bread and butter.?