Five Common Challenges of Accounts Receivable Management This free whitepaper outlines:
Understand Accounts Receivable Performance & What Metrics to Track This free whitepaper will give you a better understanding of:
We’re launching a little social experiment today. We’ve partnered with Algonquin College and Hydro Ottawa to test a new approach to commercial energy conservation. The premise is pretty straightforward: can we compel building occupants (in this case, students at a college) to conserve energy if we give them an instant feedback loop of the building’s consumption? To achieve this, we’re playing on the theory of instant feedback loops to affect human behaviour. We’ve built a website where students and faculty can view energy usage (and what it costs) in real-time. They’re urged to ratchet-back usage when the building’s consumption is above historical norms. Students in the Electrical Engineering Technology faculty have designed an accompanying awareness campaign that includes displaying the web site in high-traffic areas of the college, information packages (complete with a nifty bottle-opener) and a twitter engagement strategy (follow it here, or search #algonquinpower to participate). The site goes live today. You can check it out here to get a better idea how it works. We’ll be measuring results and packaging them in a report at the end of the awareness campaign, which runs for two weeks. The site will be up ...
Utility Tools The Consumption Management toolset gives utilities the ability to have intelligent conversations with customers about their energy usage, closing the gap between the point of consumption and the time a bill is received. Integration with the Talkonomics Process Engine ensures targeted, account-specific messaging and service offerings. All customer activity is tracked and aggregated in the Time Zero BI Dashboard, allowing you to measure your conservation accomplishments, the operational efforts required to deliver them and forecast what's on the horizon. The Kurteus consumption management toolset lets customers view their energy usage on un-cluttered, easy-to-understand graphs. It shows your actual consumption relative to the goal you set, so you always know how you're doing. A simple slider lets customers set their energy consumption reduction goals. The goals are displayed on the consumption graph against actual usage to let your customers know how they're doing. Customers can set alerts at different intervals to let them know if they're meeting or exceeding ...
You can have all the technical functionality in the world, but without an agile decision engine and strong analytics, it’s not likely to provide your customers with a good experience nor is it likely to yield high levels of performance for your company. A decision management engine drives the processes a company uses to interact with its customers, its suppliers and its operations staff. Good decision management engines will drive processes that mold mass amounts of customer interactions into business outcomes. The trick is, no process is perfect right off the bat. To make a process hum, it has to be constantly analyzed and tuned, ensuring it’s driving your business objectives and at the same time, providing a great customer experience. Key Elements You've got to have two key elements to be able to constantly analyze and tune your processes: Solid business intelligence that is timely and granular enough to provide insights for optimization opportunities The ability to make decisioning process modifications quickly and easily (aka agility) Legacy systems running business applications usually miss the mark on both these requirements. Static, month-end reports aren’t adequate to drive timely or relevant insights. Furthermore, hard-coding is required to configure, test and deploy new processes, making modifications difficult and ...
We all know that a key element of an exceptional customer experience (CX) is consistency across multiple channels. My experience with your enterprise over the phone should be similar to the web experience, which should be similar to the social media experience, and so on. This is especially significant since many utilities are placing customer engagement near the top of their strategic priorities. Customers aren’t going to engage if the experience is fractured and awkward. So, what happens when I (as a customer) am mid-interaction on the phone, sitting in front of my computer and I decide to log on to the web interface? I’m channel-surfing across your enterprise. Are you ready for that? Does the new channel pick up where the last channel left off? Is the message consistent? Am I going to get lost? Channel Switching & Message Shifting Two of the coolest yet most underrated features we’ve built into Kurteus are channel-switching and message shifting. Customers can move from phone to web, for example, and the conversation picks up exactly where it left off on the previous channel. Also, if a customer changes the status of their account mid-conversation via a self-serve application (eg. makes a payment, schedules a service), the ...
"A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires." – Bill Gates What is a Business-as-a-Service (BaaS) Model? More and more, enterprises are seeking third-party vendors to host business solutions rather than source the hardware and software themselves. This is widely known as the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and it’s making enterprises more efficient as it continues to gain widespread adoption. The thing is, a tool is only as useful as the manner in which it’s applied. That’s why the business-as-a-service (BaaS) model is emerging. In the BaaS environment, a vendor not only hosts its solution on behalf of the enterprise, it also takes part in managing the tool to ensure business goals are met. This is quite valuable as vendors generally have experience across a range of customers and industries. So, the customer not only receives a hosted business solution, they also receive a wealth of knowledge and real-world experience about how best to apply the solution to meet business goals. This delivers a new knowledge-base to your business and a third-party perspective on current processes and ways to ...
With advancements in customer care technology, the traditional role of the customer service rep (CSR) is quickly changing from a glorified service portal to a specialized customer advisor. Traditionally, the CSR acted as the hub between the customer and the utility, fulfilling service needs between the hours of 9 and 5. Today, technology is enabling customers to interface directly to the enterprise, fulfilling service needs themselves through self-serve applications over multiple channels. This is beneficial to both the customer and the utility – self-service is more convenient for the customer and costs the enterprise less. In fact, most customers with a grasp on technology would rather fulfill service needs themselves than deal with an agent in a call center – it’s easier and faster. That said, there’ll always be a need for CSRs. They’re still required to fulfill non-standard service requests or to help customers who have trouble using technology to self-manage. Also, most enterprises insist upon having a human touch point for its customers. And, a computer is rarely going to quell an irate customer, unfortunately. Beyond that, there’s a new green field for CSR’s: becoming trusted customer advisors. This especially applies ...
