Regional Utility Company - Service Transaction Fee Paid By Biller (Non-Absorbed)

Regional Client: Baltimore Gas & Electric

Overview

This East Coast client serves 1.1 million electric consumers and over 600,000 gas consumers over a 2300 square-mile area.  This company has received several accolades as well as substantial press and analyst coverage of the improvements made to their customer support tools and processes over the last several years.  The information in this case study was culled from several public sources describing the improvements that included the implementation of the BillMatrix service.

The state was deregulated in 2000, which provided the spark for a greater focus on competition and increased sensitivity to customer service issues.  A review of the remittance process was driven by the cost of company payment locations, discontinuation of company tellers by other electric and gas providers in the state, rate caps that renewed concentration on cost savings and an internal Operational Excellence initiative.

BG&E’s consumers access the BillMatrix service over the IVR using credit cards, ATM/Debit and ACH payment methods.  In addition, BillMatrix hosts a website for the BGE customer service personnel to take payment in support of collections operations.

First Year & Beyond Transaction Volume

A client since May 2001, BG&E reported taking over 600,000 calls in the first 10 months of the service being made available to their consumers.  In the ensuing years, the utility has seen a steady increase in the number of transactions with approximately 35,000 over the Internet and well over 750,000 via the IVR in 2003.

Call Center Impact

Outsourcing electronic payments was part of a larger project to revamp the tools and procedures used in the BG&E call center.  Taking over 10,000 incoming calls per day with an in-service phone time averaging in the low 70th percentile, every means to shift consumers to self-service options was used.  In addition, shifting collections calls to the IVR enabled a reduction in that staff and freed up the remainder to focus on other revenue generating tasks.  The number of CSR’s was reduced from 209 to 135 and the number of those dedicated to collections decreased from 53 to 19.  The estimated financial impact is over $1 million annually, while the utility was ranked #1 in customer service by J.D. Power & Associates in 2002. 

Financial Impact

In addition to the head count savings noted above, historically over 750,000 calls annually resulted in a payment to BG&E from the call center, with three FTE’s required to perform the backroom processing of check and credit card payments.  The finance department had 16 tellers processing over 1 million transactions annually.  The shift to self-service, electronic payments has significantly reduced the costs of remittance processing, most directly by shifting $600,000 in annual credit card processing fees to the consumers.

Technology Impacts, including Field Force Automation

The BG&E implementation was one of the first to utilize transaction messaging, allowing balance presentment, account number validation and remittance/posting of the consumer IVR payments to the customer information system in near real-time.  This was accomplished over dedicated data lines using IBM’s MQ-Series technology.  This functionality ensures that payments are credited accurately and that all disconnect/reconnect information is updated immediately.  BG&E’s field teams can call the payment inquiry line and be informed about the consumer’s status just prior to taking any action.

With more recent client implementations, BillMatrix has leveraged the latest in XML/Web services to allow a variety of methods for communication with field devices that can use the Internet to communicate data to/from a customer information system.

Marketing Support & Results

BillMatrix has formally rolled-out a consumer adoption marketing program over the last 12 months, with dedicated resources to support both successful introductions of the service and on-going efforts to increase usage.  BG&E’s introduction predates this official program, but the company actively promotes the service continuously both on its website (Attachment 1) and printed on the back of the bill each month (Attachment 2).

Information Sources:

BG&E presentation at CIS Conference in May, 2004

Fortnightly’s Energy Customer Management, Sept/Oct 2002

Chartwell’s Best Practices for Utilities & Energy Companies, July 2003