American Water use BDEx to enhance SAP for utilities

About the Customer

How a major US utility is leveraging exception management software in its business transformation and continuous improvement initiatives

With headquarters in Voorhees, NJ, they are

the largest publicly traded water and wastewater utility company in the

United States.

American Water is a public utility company operating in the United States and Canada. It was founded in 1886 as the American Water Works & Guarantee Company and in 1947 was reorganized as American Water Works Company, Inc.

American Water, through its subsidiaries, provides high-quality water and wastewater services to approximately 15 million people in more than 45 states, as well as parts of Canada.

About the Customer

About the Customer

5.4m calls annually from regulated customer base

5.4m invoices generated annually

400K pieces of incoming correspondence handled annually6,400

employees15m people provided with high-quality water and waste services

45 states serviced in US and part of Canada

$

The Challenge

The Challenge

In 2013, American Water deployed an integrated SAP solution including HR, Supply Chain, Finance, Engineering & Construction, Field Operations and Customer Service. This solution replaced end-of life systems that lacked necessary integration and had been heavily customized.

The goal was to do this and improve operational efficiency. However, American Water was aware of the typical challenges that other companies that have experience with similar system implementations SAP CR&B for Utilities – specifically that productivity could dip for a period of time after go-live.

Engineering & Construction

HR

Supply Chain

Field Operations

Customer Service

Finance

About the Customer

For a period of time after go-live companies initially experience increases in:

customer call volume, average handle time to complete customer requests, and more customer complaints

estimated meter readings

customer accounts that do not bill and/or print during their expected billing cycle and require some kind of manual intervention to complete

the number of implausibles/exceptions that block business processes from being completed (e.g. billing)

ineffectively scheduled field work resulting in missing due dates and appointments

About the Customer

Standard exception management in SAP CR&B is no easy task.

In particular, after a CIS deployment, average resolution times for handling customer issues and inquiries typically causes a backlog of exceptions and then late billing issues start to appear.

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About the Customer

This becomes a counter-productive cycle; with more customers calling, the larger the exception backlog gets.

American Water wanted to mitigate these common impacts of exception processing in SAP. Their goal was to improve customer satisfaction and on-time billing, not make it worse.

With 5.4 Million calls received from their regulated customer base, 37 Million invoices generated annually and 400,000 pieces of incoming correspondence every year, it was all too easy for things to quickly escalate at an alarming rate.

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About the Customer

SAP’s out-of-the box approach to exceptions management is unintuitive and the reliance on paper reports makes it difficult to track customer issue resolution.

Plus, it’s difficult to monitor the on-time billing process.

American Water understand the risk of limited visibility in their exception handling process.

American Water was worried about the impact of a new system deployment on their customers and needed to ensure that customer service and on-time, accurate billing would be improved over time rather than degraded.

The ability to have a holistic view of all exception activity for the meter to cash process was critical to meeting this goal.

meter cash

The Solution

What did American Water do?

The Solution

American Water opted for a customer-centric approach to exception management - with one easy-to-use holistic view of all exceptions and transactions.

The Solution

They enhanced their call handling success by equipping CSRs with visibility into exception management actions and in turn, deflected inquiries about the status of billing issue resolution.

The Solution

Not only is American Water now resolving exceptions faster, they are enforcing the link between exceptions and their root cause, with underlying issues identified and fixed once.

Multiple touches of the same contract account are limited as a result of the customer-centric view.

The Solution

“The intuitive nature of the BDEx solution aided in the training for SAP CR&B and reduced training for 104 billing department employees by 520 hours. Back office employees adapted quicker to the new system by using BDEx’s menu driven navigation within ECC. We were able to accomplish our customer goals, in part, by providing employees with an intuitive exception management tool.”

Tammy MacLaughlinCIS Lead on SAP Business Transformation Program

The Solution

“With the holistic view across the organization, our front-line customer service representatives can quickly see the status of bills, and any reasons behind delays. While billing issues and delays are inevitable with a new system roll out, we were able to create visibility for our CSRs so they could more effectively respond to the customer inquiries. This lowered stress for our front-line employees and reduced the need to hand-off inquiries to back office staff.”

Meg NeafseyVice President of Customer Service

What does this mean to American Water?

What does this mean to American Water?

American Water is able to more effectively resolve the exceptions that lead to billing delays within a short time frame. On average 6,000 billing related exceptions are now resolved on a daily basis allowing for associated invoices to be released within 3 days of meter reading, with 98% of customer billing issued within 24 hours of meter reading.

6,000billing related

exceptions 3 days 98%

bills issued

24hours

What does this mean to American Water?

American Water is getting better at delivering on their core value of customer service. Their front line customer service representatives have more information at their fingertips.

When coupled with American Water’s continuous improvement culture, they are introducing processes to reduce the number of hand-offs to back office staff – contributing toward positive customer satisfaction and improved first contact resolution rates.

As they move through stabilization of the SAP implementation, CSRs will receive further training using information that can be derived from the holistic view of exception activity.

Things like:

What does this mean to American Water?

Proactively resolving consecutively estimated billing

Providing the status and expected resolution time of a customer billing issue Understanding and

responding to high bill inquiries with confidence

American Water is benefiting from additional reporting including:

What does this mean to American Water?

A status report of the total number and type of exception cases that have occurred

Trending exception activity for root cause analysis

A productivity report tracing the productivity of all back office agents – the work carried out and time taken to complete – to give indication of performance

The robust nature of the solution has also given American Water a sense of accomplishment. The business functions it supports directly affect the level of service delivered to customers and ultimately the bottom line.

Employees report a high degree of satisfaction in using the BDEx application and quickly realized the value it provided to account investigations and exception resolution.

“This off the shelf, SAP-centric solution was the perfect choice. As well as making the service to the end customer more efficient, BDEx has given us speed to value with a nice, clean solution implemented quickly and easily.” Tom Slook Chief Enterprise Architect, ITS

What does this mean to American Water?

How is BDEx helping American Water transform customer satisfaction?

American Water implemented BDEx from Basis Technologies across two systems, CRM and IS-U.

Following a recommendation from American Water’s Solution Implementer, Basis Technologies was a core part of the program, joining at the beginning of the blueprinting phase, and installing BDEx before going live in May 2013.

How is BDEx helping American Water transform customer satisfaction?

IS-U

CRM

BDEx has been utilized across four key areas of high volume customer-facing transactions across the American Water landscape:

“Looking at the high volume of transactions, we knew that we would need the right tool to help support us and effectively manage exception activity across some of our key process areas. BDEx has met that expectation and more. ” Tammy MacLaughlin CIS Lead on SAP Business Transformation Program

How is BDEx helping American Water transform customer satisfaction?

Service Order follow up actions

Collections

BillingDevice

Management

How is BDEx helping American Water transform customer satisfaction?

“At the end of the day, it’s all to help get information out of the door to our customers.

It’s what our customers expect of us and it’s what we deliver with assistance from BDEx.”

Meg NeafseyVice President of Customer Service

Everything we do is customer-centric. Timely, accurate billing means enhanced customer satisfaction.

About the Customer

BDExpart of BDiApps

basistechnologies.com