STORM® transforms service and capacity for ScottishPower
31st March 2010
ScottishPower, one of the UK’s leading integrated energy providers, has chosen the STORM® platform to host its incident management and response contact centre estate. STORM services deployed by ScottishPower include CONTACT™ hosted contact centre with full IVR and ACD capabilities, LOSS™ loss of service handling and SPEAK™ speech recognition. “Most of our systems were on site, with about 10% of our capacity outsourced as an overflow solution,” says Nicola Stewart, Process Improvement Manager for ScottishPower. “We had two suppliers and two sets of support and management overheads, with all the additional time and cost involved whenever issues arose.”
Single platform
With everything now hosted on a single platform, ScottishPower has been able to consolidate and control its costs. Operational expenses are lower and routine management and maintenance overheads have almost been eliminated. Service to customers is also improving, with concomitant reductions in traffic to contact centres and smoothing of peaks in demand. “STORM has given us massively increased flexibility,” says Nicola Stewart. “It has a fantastic product for building IVR, which means we can make our service more responsive and personalised.”
Manageable peaks
A key challenge for ScottishPower is the sudden peaks in traffic that hit the contact centres whenever a loss of supply occurs. Even planned outages can cause spikes in demand, and patterns can remain unpredictable throughout the process of resolving an incident. “We are under close scrutiny from Ofgem, the regulator, to deliver continuous customer service improvements,” says Nicola Stewart. “There are times when demand can go from almost nothing to five thousand calls within 30 minutes.” STORM LOSS provides the facility to send an SMS message to all customers affected by an incident, assuring them that the problem has been noted and that work is underway to fix it. The system dramatically reduces the number of people who call just for reassurance that the problem is being addressed.
Rapid IVR
STORM allows IVR messages to be recorded and deployed quickly. Says Nicola Stewart: “When customers call, they are routed automatically to an announcement recorded specifically for the incident, rather than a bland, generic message. This immediately helps to reassure them that we are focused on resolving the issue promptly. ”STORM SPEAK™ increases the volume of customers that Scottish Power can link to an incident, allowing customers to provide the necessary details simply by speaking to the system, rather than having to use a keypad or wait to speak to an agent.
Partnership
The business-focused approach of the STORM team meant that the solutions required by ScottishPower could be developed rapidly, based on existing STORM technologies. “It has been more like a partnership than a typical customer-supplier relationship,” says Nicola Stewart. “The Content Guru developers looked at our business and were able to show us products they had already developed that addressed our needs. “We were blown away by the STORM platform and by the approach of the Content Guru team,” she concludes. “They worked in partnership with us to deliver exactly what we needed.”
For further information call +[44] (0)1344 852 350 or text Guru to 66663.
