The 2018 Western Energy Institute (WEI) Customer + Corporate Symposium brought more than 250 professionals together to discuss the latest industry trends and best practices in corporate and customer services. At the symposium, PA’s Customer and Digital Transformation expert, Craig Rintoul, presented with Josh Jacobs, Director of Business Integration at Puget Sound Energy (PSE), on the topic, “Drive your utility to see through the customer’s point of view.” The presentation was based on PSE’s Get To Zero (GTZ) program, in which PA led the roadmap phase and continues to provide support in program delivery leadership.
The following Q&A highlights key takeaways from the presentation, and PA’s approach to helping utilities transform the customer experience.
AMANDA LEVIN: What is PSE’s GTZ program?
CRAIG RINTOUL: PSE launched the GTZ effort to become the customers’ energy partner of choice. To do so, PSE identified the need to transform the customer experience by proactively addressing their desire to access the utility through innovative tools, systems, and processes. What makes GTZ fairly unique is taking an enterprise level approach to this customer transformation program, which affects all parts of the organization. The four areas the program covers are: streamlining and improving billing, payment, credit and collections processes; redesigning how customers interact with the utility; improving data quality and analytics; and optimizing field work through automated and mobile solutions.
Why is the customer relationship important right now, and why is there so much interest in PSE’s GTZ program, in particular?
RINTOUL: Most utilities – whether they are regulated or unregulated – are recognizing the value of the customer relationship. There are a lot of things going on at the moment, including the fact that the whole industry has become more competitive due to the ability for customers now to provide a lot of their own energy through distributed energy resources. If you combine solar with batteries, you are moving toward self-contained energy generation and distribution systems. So for utilities, they are seeing that their future could see declining growth, or even declining operating margins, as more and more customers move towards that kind of model. On top of that, from a customer experience perspective, the customer is not just judging their experiences with their utility and others, but also from the experiences they are having with companies in other industries. They expect an experience similar to what they would receive from Amazon, they are looking for end-to-end self-service, and an overall ability to get information about products and services on their own time. Most utilities are also recognizing that if they are going to have declining load growth and margins in future years, they need to provide ancillary products and services, but to do so, they need an already strong relationship with the customer. It will also be important for utilities to be seen as effective at using modern digital technologies. Since this is what GTZ is trying to do – put together a large customer digital transformation – most utilities want to see how PSE is progressing and the lessons learned along the way.
This transition to become customer-focused clearly needs to happen, but it seems daunting as utilities have conducted their businesses in a certain way for so many years. How does a utility make this transition?
RINTOUL: Daunting is correct! PSE CEO Kimberly Harris originally envisioned the GTZ program and I think that having the drive and ambition coming from the top down was significant and ultimately very important. She put it out as a challenge to the organization to fix the issues that caused customers problems. We at PA were engaged fairly early on in the process and this allowed us to really break down these problems and find solutions. We took the early customer analytics that were available, and using a data driven approach to analyze call volume, we were able to separate out the issues that customers were facing, including:
- I need you to explain my bill
- I want to pay my bill
- I need financial assistance
- I’m experiencing service interruption
- I have a planned service event
While some of these issues may have seemed relatively simple on the surface, there was a lot of complexity behind them and it was important for us to help PSE achieve a more effective way for customers to transact.
Recognizing that the GTZ program is still ongoing, can you talk about what PSE looked like prior to the GTZ launch?
RINTOUL: Before GTZ, PSE had about four million customer calls, half of which were contained within the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) unit, and about two million made their way to the customer care team. PSE already had a great customer facing team, however, due to the organic nature of how the systems were built, there was more complexity than there should have been. For example, if a customer wanted to make a payment, there were many different methods available. The ability for a customer to confirm a payment, depended on the timing and the channel they came through.
In addition to billing, payment and credit processes, the scope of GTZ has also been looking at how field workers interact with customers. The situation there was also complex, as there was a mix of old and new systems that had more opportunity to be integrated, making it difficult to schedule work in an optimized way. Before GTZ, a field worker’s day would start by coming into the office and spending time reviewing paper-based work orders. All of this information was not presented to them in a geographic way, so routing and scheduling could be sub-optimal. Added to that, there were many different systems in which customer data was stored and PSE did not have accurate email addresses for the bulk of its customers. If I compare that state to now, the situation has been greatly improved, especially with regard to valid email addresses and cell numbers.
What is your advice to utilities looking to embark on similar endeavors?
RINTOUL: The approach that we took with PSE, albeit customized, was to leverage our agile, customer digital transformation methodology, which is effectively Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast. In terms of Think Big, it is much better to have a single program of work related to one common objective; Start Small is about quick-wins and proving the program’s success early on so the utility can build on the momentum; and Scale Fast consists of putting in place the program structure, organization, governance and developing a road map. Once you have the road map, you can scale up and bring in the right partners who can provide the right skills and services in order to execute. It’s really about understanding what you are trying to achieve up front, identifying what it is, the vision, objectives, and the measurements of success.
How do utilities choose the ‘right’ technologies for their organizations?
RINTOUL: When building the roadmap, we looked at the key processes and from those, we tagged the high volume use cases that were causing customers the most issues. From there, we identified the impacted customers and conducted over 40 customer interviews. In the interviews, we discussed each customer’s journey: the steps the customer had to take, navigating the process, the pain points, the positive elements of the experience, and we also talked about what a more optimal journey would look like. We workshopped with PSE staff to consolidate those customer journeys and come up with a much more desirable outcome for the customer. Ultimately, it is important to understand the problem you are trying to solve before you jump into any technology selections.
For example, we quickly realized that the website, which is currently on Sharepoint, would not be sufficient to support the volume of transactions we wanted to execute. An early understanding was that we needed to move to a new web platform. We looked at two platforms, Sitecore and Adobe, and selected Sitecore. We also looked at numerous IVR technologies and data analytics tools as we saw the need to have a solution that would help PSE to monitor different communication channels. Ideally, if a customer starts on the web and then calls the IVR, the IVR knows the customer’s last interaction was on the web, and progresses the customer’s call to resolution in a more quick and concise manner. With IVR, there was also a need for more natural interaction and to understand the customer’s emotional state and sentiment, whereby we could contain more calls and perform analytics on call history.
Can you talk about the successes you have seen so far with GTZ?
RINTOUL: One success was very simple, when we changed the IVR menu options (i.e. press one for billing, etc.) to match the call volume, the result was greater self-service and reduced agent handled call volume. A more complicated one was related to providing more effective communications with customers during an outage using a whole array of technologies. This project delivered successfully over two years, but we considered it a quick-win because we were able to get functionality out quickly and early due to the use of an agile approach.
We were not only successful in terms of reducing the number of calls to the utility, but also in improving and solidifying PSE’s relationship with its customer base. We have received some great feedback from customers saying how grateful they are for PSE putting these new technologies in place and to keep up the good work!
Other than new technologies, processes and data – did PSE consider changes to its operating model?
RINTOUL: A common pitfall we see within many digital transformations is that they focus on the technology – not how work will be delivered and the underlying structure of the organization. Essentially, layering in new technology and mapping out new processes on an existing organizational model can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. Re-examining end-to-end processes e.g. meter-to-cash in light of the new technology can result in an updated and more efficient operating model. We call this a Target Operating Model and it’s critical to fully realizing expected benefits.
What is next for PSE?
RINTOUL: PSE is now undertaking the mainstay of this large scale digital transformation. As a result, we are hoping to see some exciting changes this year and into next, such as rollout of a new app, website and IVR. The GTZ program is one of the largest and complex ever undertaken by a US utility, and we are so pleased we helped PSE make this happen.
Craig, thank for you for discussing the GTZ program with the Utility Dive audience.
For readers interested in more information, please contact Craig at [email protected]
