This national energy supplier had an issue managing customer debt.

Individual customer debt could grow either through customer action or through billing systems not being reliably updated with smart meter data.

A large team was manually investigating any suspected affected accounts, they had a backlog of thousands of accounts for review at any point in time, and individual customer debt was often not dealt with until it was at unmanageable levels for the individual concerned.

Having previously developed an RPA (software automation) solution that halved average handling time in one of the energy company’s outsourced call centres, I was asked if  RPA could support their internal debt triage process.

I spent 2 days onsite with the debt process subject matter experts, to map the existing processes for debt triage and to design a single overarching process that would be suitable for automation.

6 separate applications were involved, and over 85 separate debt risk indicators were identified.

I then spent 24 days developing an automation that would check all of these risk indicators for any single customer, and update the CRM with its findings.

• What did you do to help… Improved internal satisfaction
• What did you do to help… Gain context and insight to enable faster, more informed decisions and actions
• What did you do to help… Improved clarity, accuracy & confidence in decision making
• What did you do to help… Reduce time and errors in decision making

The automation was able to triage thousands of accounts per week, reducing the backlog to nil within weeks.

Approximately 75% of accounts investigated were “no issues found” – automating this meant human agents did not waste any time on such accounts as they were excluded from further investigation.

Of the remaining 25%, the human agents would offer appropriate advice to the customer – but they started from the point of knowing what the source of the problem was rather than having to investigate the accounts themselves. This was much more productive use of human skills.

The client company made the estimate that the automation was doing the work of 35 FTEs.

• What did you do to help… More satisfied and engaged employees with increased productivity
• What did you do to help… Direct positive impact on internal and external customer satisfaction
• What did you do to help… Successful, timely delivery of evidence based transformative change

• Process Analysis
• business analysis
• business and it operational processes
• process automation
• process improvement
• Project delivery

• Process Effectiveness & Automation

• Power and Utilities