The good old days of Customer Operations, where you were just being asked to improve service while reducing costs, are gone. New demands, mandates, technologies, and social responsibilities have dramatically changed the business landscape. For example, something as simple and fundamental as meter reading now involves Smart Meter/Smart Grid, communications backbones, AMI, MDM, interval data, hourly consumption, and presentation management just to meet your minimum requirements. Collections used to be as simple as sending regulatory messages in the right order and getting a field collector to follow up. Today it’s about portfolio management, behavioral modeling and analytics, scoring, risk-based collection strategies, outsourcer management, reserve margins, and call and payment management strategies. Call center management has a whole new set of challenges keeping up with increasing customer and management expectations, increasing pressure to reduce transaction costs, and increasing complexity in customer offerings and interactions. How does all of this impact your CIS? Don’t even ask…
Our extensive experience working end to end across the meter-to-cash process enables us to provide you pragmatic insights in managing through this unprecedented change. Together we develop clear strategies and tactics to transform your operations to meet the challenges ahead.
Underpinning this subject-matter expertise, and core to our business, is our industry-recognized CIS “know how.” Process change alone, while critical to performance, doesn’t get you far. It’s all about automation. We can quickly determine if your CIS is up to the task, needs enhancement, or needs replacing. Together, we develop your plan that is tailored to get you where you want to be. From there you decide how you would like us to participate in implementing the plan and supporting your operation.
- Operational strategy and tactical planning
- Process improvement and reengineering
- CIS evaluation, justification, and implementation
- Outsourcing vendor evaluations and solutions
- Operational expertise, solutions, and support:
customer care | billing and payment processing |metering and field operations |
credit and collections | acquisition, sales, and marketing
IMPROVE OPERATIONS & MANAGE COSTS
As every customer-facing aspect of your business becomes more demanding and complex, you face increasing pressure to become more nimble, efficient, and effective. We can help—by building your internal solution team, setting up effective support functions, and evaluating whether you need to improve, augment, or replace your CIS or related applications. Once a strategy is chosen, we can help you evaluate solution alternatives, develop the business case, and integrate every component so that you can achieve the optimum benefit.
Most problems don’t require you to implement new customer operations systems. Instead, solutions to many operational issues simply require innovation to work around existing CIS limitations. We understand the challenges in doing this, and are uniquely positioned to help your organization succeed. We use our years of experience to help you resolve your current issues, optimize existing processes, leverage best practices, and institute performance management and monitoring programs. We’ll show you just what to measure, and how, in order to manage change, costs, and performance effectively.
SATISFY REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS
When you face strict service-level requirements, every minute you spend on the phone with customers counts. So we provide process-oriented and technological solutions that address the needs of your customers and deliver right-now savings for your business. And when it’s time to demonstrate good faith and due diligence to your regulatory, consumer, or internal overseers, we’re right behind you every step of the way. We help you justify rates and expenses, mitigate customer complaints, negotiate moratoriums, and enforce turn-on/disconnect rules. Balance the needs of your customers with your own right to minimize unnecessary losses and operate your business effectively.
ENHANCE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
To keep customers satisfied, it’s crucial that you find ways to meet and exceed their expectations, even as you’re finding ways to deal with them faster while using fewer of your costly resources. So no matter what solution we recommend for optimizing your customer operations, we make sure it doesn’t compromise your customer relationships. We also offer you smart ways to manage customer accounts, give customers self-service options, outsource work when it’s beneficial for your business, and monitor the performance of your customer service operations.
MANAGE RISK
Today’s economic environment presents increased risk factors—factors that impact you because they affect your customers’ ability and willingness to pay for your services. We’re experts at helping you screen and monitor risk performance so you can lessen the impact of delinquency. We can also increase the success of your collection efforts by empowering you to establish and integrate more effective policies, platforms, and processes.
LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY
Occasionally companies must upgrade their customer operations systems. Whether it’s a complete CIS replacement, a new AMI/MDM, credit subsystem, or call center application, it’s prudent to bring in experts to augment your team with the tools, experience, and skills that will make your team more productive, and minimize risk. Bass & Company has earned its reputation across the industry as the place to turn for hands-on experts who not only roll up their sleeves to guide you to a successful implementation, but work with you through it as well.
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