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UTILITY WEEK | 24TH - 30TH APRIL 2015 | 21 Sponsored Report: contact centres Reducing debt among European SME base A supplier of gas and electricity to homes and businesses wanted to explore outsourcing as a way to improve debt collection from its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customer base. The outsourced operation needed to have highly skilled agents up and running within a few weeks. Some work processes also needed mapping to support training and the management information and reporting measures needed to meet high compliance standards. Scope of Work • Make outbound calls and receive inbound calls to collect debt from the SME customer base. • Back office functions to support the debt collection process, including multi-channel operations. Solution • A new delivery centre set up in Cape Town, South Africa, specifically for the debt collection activity. • A recruitment strategy was designed and implemented to attract the best talent with the required skill sets. A high calibre of expe- rienced management was also put in place. • The transition project team travelled to the client location to conduct due dili- gence and understand the requirements for transition. • Stringent assessments were carried out at numerous stages of the training phase to ensure the level of competency was high. • Ongoing assessments are carried out with the operation to reinforce the high level of operations required. This ensures compli- ance according to Ofgem standards. Benefits • Labour arbitrage benefit of the offshore location, making a positive impact on the cost to serve. Produced in association with: Case studies Experience goes a long way when it comes to implementing offshore customer care solutions, and WNS has established a client list that includes utilities from Europe and the US. • A quick and seamless transition of ser- vices from the client location to South Africa allowed for minimal disruption to the clients end customers. • The implementation of a dialler solu- tion increased the number of calls made per agent per day, positively affecting the cost to serve and cash collected. • Debt collected for the operation has aver- aged at 18 per cent above target so far. • The additional money collected has allowed further cost to serve savings to be made as it results in less reliance on the use of costly external debt collection agencies for early arrears. An average saving per month of £70,000 has been achieved. • Knowledge capture has been another advantage of the transition, as processes have been documented. • An incentive based cost structure has been created to reward a high performing operation. This has also allowed high per- forming agents to be rewarded individually. Raising customer satisfaction across two continents A dual fuel provider with a presence in Europe and North America was seeking to nurture growth by significantly increasing customer satisfaction and reducing opera- tional costs. Solution Building on an existing relationship with the client, WNS tailored a flexible customer care offering including multichannel cus- tomer communications using voice, email and white mail . The solution also included management of critical back office processes. Key features of the WNS solution include: • Strong partnership with the client. WNS has worked with this client for over seven years, from the time it implemented its first SAP platform. WNS is able to leverage its expertise on all client and industry systems to help improve consumer experience. • Flexibility. The customer care team is easily scalable and can respond to rapid increases in customer interaction volumes, for instance as a result of changing systems or pricing announcements. The team quickly and successfully scaled from 26 to over 1,500 people in India, in eight months, including a broad range of skill sets. • Robust training platform. While scal- ing the team quickly, training materials were revamped to better balance theory and hands-on practice. A training-to-operations handover manual was created alongside a comprehensive training and operations sup- port system for new team members. • Focus on quality. Six Sigma and analyt- ics projects were introduced to the customer care operation, aligning with wider continu- ous improvement activity • Innovative commercial models. WNS has actively proposed and changed commer- cial models such as transaction pricing and account-based pricing to reduce the client's operational costs, commit upfront benefit and drive customer centric behaviour. Benefits • 40 per cent lower operational costs by off- shoring to India and South Africa. • Further 15 per cent reduction in costs by moving to innovative commercial models in few businesses. • Improvement in customer satisfaction measures using a variety of operational and process improvement initiatives. • Improving consumer-facing programmes to reduce repeat contact rates, in turn impacting consumer satisfaction. • Improving debt recovery by identifying reasons for debt accrual, and recommending a new tariff and measurement system. This project delivered a multimillion pound ben- efit and was awarded the Chairman's Club Award by the client. • Rapid learning curve, reducing the time for a team member to reach optimum pro- ductivity, and increasing productivity. • Digitising of key tasks by eliminating non-value-added steps and standardising best practices.