Geospatial Customer Care Strategies in a Competitive Utility Market
In the end, the customer will ask for and demand what customers have demanded in all competitive industries—better service, faster response, and less expensive pricing. The only way to reach these lofty goals is through a Geospatial Customer Care program that provides technology solutions, humanistic solutions, and process solutions that all point to better customer service, intelligent customer data, and more flexible solutions to fit customer needs. Spatial data plays a key role in effectively meeting the needs of your customers.
Utilities that avoid change or lose sight of the fact that they may have competition for the customer may find out that a long-term customer does not always mean a happy loyal customer. Customers can be retained in a competitive deregulated environment when the utility understands and provides the choice of services, the level of support, and the pricing model that the customer wants.
By leveraging existing customer data that resides in the CIS, acquiring targeted industry or regional demographic data, and generating a positive brand awareness based on a reputation of strong customer service and flexible appropriate solutions, utilities will not only retain customers, but will also build market share. As the utility builds strong brand awareness, the logical next step is to add new services. Bundling services and products is a tried and proven strategy throughout all deregulated industries. By investing in a spatial customer care initiative, the utility will be leveraging existing CIS data with network data, prospective customer demographics, and internal resource abilities into the core
database by which decisions can be reached with more intelligence.
New advances in database technology now enable utilities to manage all their spatial data in the database and make it accessible to a large range of business applications, including ERP, enterprise resource planning, and CRM, customer relationship management. Current database technology provides high-end performance and reliability necessary to support location-enabled Front and Back Office applications like call centers, dispatching services, and network management activities. This data is now accessible through desktop, client-server, internet, and intranet environments. Both internal web deployment or external “customer facing” web applications assist in the mission of supporting and growing your customer market share.
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