A statewide electric power company partnered with Exela to upgrade its variable messaging and billing insert program to improve customer engagement
Challenge
A large Midwestern power company providing service to more than 126,000 customers across seven counties offered a variety of flexible paper and electronic payment options, combined billing, and budget billing plans. As a customer-owned cooperative, the company was very concerned about providing quality customer service, which was reflected in its commitment to provide bill credits in the event that it failed to honor its defined service standards. The power company’s focus on customer satisfaction and its effort to offer flexible billing and payment options made transitioning to a new billing vendor significantly more challenging, as most vendors could not provide the services they required. As the manager of customer operations said, “one of the biggest challenges in implementing a selective insert or variable messaging program is maintaining data integrity. We understood from experience that minimizing file manipulation significantly reduces the introduction of errors. Our goal was to touch the data only once.”
Solution
Exela was chosen to take over the power company’s billing and statements operations, due to our ability to handle billing and statement optimization and automation, our existing print and mail infrastructure, and our years of experience.
We began by developing a detailed process map that clearly defined all deliverables and milestones. We then conducted a detailed analysis of the company’s existing workflows, business needs, and technical requirements. The exploration phase was the basis for the development of a highly customized solution approach that addressed the identified needs of the company. After beta testing and gathering customer feedback, we fully implemented our billing solution within five months, without process disruption.
Benefits
-
Seamless conversion to the new solution
-
A proven, end-to-end variable messaging system
-
Improved billing agility and the flexibility to change messaging dynamically
-
Inline selective inserting from a single data file
-
Online document review and approval
-
The electronic image archive provides instant access to billing documents
-
User-friendly tools for better process control
-
Customer maintained the high level of customer service they have always been committed to
-
Solution enabled hyper-targeted marketing
