Geospatial Customer Care Strategies in a Competitive Utility Market

Today’s utility companies are looking at implementing a spatially enabled Customer Care strategy as a means to gain a competitive advantage in the market. We will discuss how a strong corporate Customer Care initiative includes data sharing and integration with AM/FM, CIS, CRM, and ERP core systems. Geospatial Customer Care strategies can enhance communications before the sale, service provisioning and delivery, service verification, technical support, field service, billing, follow-up, monitoring customer satisfaction, marketing, and customer data tracking and analysis for decision support.

Geospatial Customer Care includes communications before the sale, service provisioning and delivery, service verification, technical support, field service, billing, follow-up, monitoring customer satisfaction, and customer data tracking and analysis for decision support. Each of these functions needs to be integrated into the Customer Care strategy. Taking good care of your customers is the key to success in a competitive deregulated industry.

Increased Competition
Increased competition and emerging deregulation should set standards for service reliability, safety, consumer protection, and environmental safeguards. Deregulation would require unbundling of electric rates as quickly as possible and full customer choice by a designated time.

In a deregulated market, competition will increase. Energy distributors will attempt to lure customers through pricing advantages, sophisticated bundling and unbundling of services, better customer service, and combinations of all the above. Business processes will need to be changed to allow customers to choose services with unbundled billing components, to allow for alternative customer field support options, and to allow for targeted marketing programs that will serve the specific needs of customers.