Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | APRIL 2021 | 37 Operational Excellence Comment Chris Rainsforth Head of operational best practice, Verint O rganisations have shown incredible agility over the last year and many have swi ly implemented new strategies to support changing customer contact patterns and their workforce. The challenge, as we move out of emergency mode, is to ensure that technolo- gies, work ows and processes truly complement each other for whatever the future holds, otherwise a rapidly widening engagement capacity gap is likely to emerge. This gap is the di erence between resources available to meet customer demand and the exploding vol- ume of customer interactions. In the past, addressing the engagement capacity gap would mean throwing more people at the problem and hoping for the best. That's an expensive solu- tion which doesn't scale. What's required, moving forward, is Head of operational best practice, Verint "It's time to address the customer engagement capacity gap" a new set of capabilities that allow leaders to break down barriers and eliminate the constraints of organisational and data silos; deliver di erenti- ated experiences and consist- ently across every interaction and channel; and improve the engagement of the new work- force of people and bots. Our latest Verint research report, The Engagement Capac- ity Gap Study (https://www. verint.com/engagement/your- challenges/boundless-customer- engagement), shows that AI and machine learning are essential to getting insights and guidance quickly to agents. By blend- ing human experience with automation, agents and back o‚ ce colleagues can work in more varied environments and can facilitate distinct, enhanced customer experiences. Engage- ment data is the key to rewiring an organisation to compete in an uncertain future. You need to capture everything your organi- sation knows about customers and their journeys, then make it comprehensible and relevant to everyone in the customer experi- ence loop. The learning from the past 12 to 18 months needs to form the blueprint for change within any organisation. We have, by and large, proved that we can work di erently and deal with customers in innovative ways. Now is the time to build on this and create meaningful and lasting customer and employee experiences that foster loyalty and ensure growth. in association with advantage of that by releasing features at a time when there was a lot of hunger for them," he says. Unlocking potential The pace of change and ways in which the pandemic forced utilities to do things di er- ently appears to have created lasting change. Utilities point to the shi s in customer behaviour as presaging an exciting future. "More customers have been using new features, which gives us a great opportunity to learn from them. I'm excited about con- tinued digitisation. People are have become more familiar with paperless billing during lockdown. There's an opportunity now to take things forward and say, for instance, 'it's far better not to have a paper statement every three months'," says Blake. Utilities now have an opportunity to take the momentum of the past year and channel it into gaining deeper understanding of new work ows and customer behaviours. "The challenge, as we move out of emergency mode, is to ensure that technologies, work- ows and processes truly complement each other for whatever the future holds. Other- wise, a widening engagement capacity gap is likely to emerge," says Chris Rainsforth, head of operational best practice at Verint. To read the full, in-depth Insight Report, please visit the downloads section at: www.utilityweek.co.uk "Within the fi rst week of lockdown, we had 84 per cent of agents working from home." Ben Blake, CEO, Ovo Energy and Smart Home lockdown, we had 84 per cent of agents working from home." Ben Blake, CEO, Ovo Energy and Smart Home Comment Simon Rudkin Vice president, cloud and hosting at Verint C ustomer engagement strate- gies need to be able to pivot at speed to navigate and accom- modate fast-evolving customer attitudes and behaviours. How- ever, legacy customer engage- ment platforms aren't geared to respond with this agility. Typi- cally, on-premises environments are layered in complexity, they take time, money and resources to adapt – with change in one area potentially impacting elsewhere. Just when you need pace, they bring problems. This is where the cloud comes in. A cloud-powered customer engagement infrastructure ena- bles you to adapt more quickly to whatever changing business circumstances you face, while new customer and employee ini- tiatives can be launched in days not months. So ware updates occur just like they do on your mobile device – instantly and transparently. There are also added bene™ ts if you have a trusted third-party managing your platform. For example, you devote less time to operations and more to what matters: con- necting with customers, innova- tion, and decision-making. The pandemic has proven that massive shi s in volumes and channel interactions can suddenly appear out of nowhere. While the sheer size and scale of Covid-19's impact is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime experience, we all know that more normal evolution will now escalate further. By moving cus- tomer engagement to the cloud, organisations gain the agility and exibility to adapt quickly both to the ongoing crisis as well as whatever challenge may lie over the horizon. "Cloud infrastructure lets companies adapt quickly to changing circumstances"

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