Shorten Response Times in Customer Service With Automation
Customer service and private customer sales of “Energie und Wasser Potsdam” digitalised and automated.
Whether it’s energy price brakes, instalment payments, water quality or heat pump electricity – Energie und Wasser Potsdam GmbH (EWP) receives hundreds of enquiries at its customer centre every day. Since 2022, the omnichannel contact centre software novomind iAGENT has bundled all questions via e-mail, letter and telephone for the energy and water business divisions in a central digital platform. This ensures automated distribution in the service team. Response times have thus been extremely shortened and the availability of the customer centre by telephone has been significantly optimised.
More than 125,000 customer enquiries per year
EWP supplies around 92,000 customers with electricity, gas, water, district heating, solar, electromobility and photovoltaics. On average, the EWP customer centre receives around 65,000 customer enquiries per year by e-mail and letter and 60,000 by telephone. In peak times with particularly high volumes, the largely missing networked, digital ITC infrastructure sometimes led to longer waiting times for consumers until their question was answered. EWP staff had to manually process customer enquiries from the different channels, sort and distribute mails and letters and scan them. This has changed with the contact centre software.
Automatic customer identification
The email backlog was already reduced by 30 per cent in the first weeks after the introduction of iAGENT. The central intelligent routing instance also optimises load distribution as well as call flows and cushions peaks so that the waiting time for consumers in the telephone service is only a few minutes. The integration of existing CRM modules ensures automatic customer identification for e-mail and telephony as well as activity transfer for transaction archiving. Access to the respective contact history and documents such as invoices for incoming enquiries simplifies processing for the service team. A connection to the document management software KOFAX also makes letter processing digitally possible. Uniform load and productivity reporting ensures transparent processes and effective control. In a matter of seconds, things that previously took 10 to 15 minutes can now be viewed and completed.
RPA-supported processing of customer enquiries
Merging the communication channels on one platform has significantly changed the workflow in the EWP team and taken it to a new level. The contact centre software from novomind has laid the foundation for RPA-supported (Robotic Process Automation) processing of customer enquiries and thus significantly increases the degree of digitalisation of the processes. This is also reflected in the “TOP Local Supplier” award for electricity, gas and heating from the consumer portal “Energieverbraucherportal.de”, which EWP received this year. For the first time, the area of “digitalisation” was also taken into account in the evaluation process this time. “By automating processes and providing custom-fit solutions, we want to support and relieve the burden on users of our software so that they can offer their customers perfect service,” says Stefan Grieben, CEO of novomind.
