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Customer operations and strategy for energy and utilities from IBM
Executive summary Business view Technical details
The goal
A roadmap to better business
Utilities wrestle with revolving regulations, prolonged processes, unwieldy enterprises and aging IT systems. As a result, they fail to reduce operational costs while their customer service suffers. IBM can help your utility company break the cycle, update information systems and improve customer service for maximum profitability.

The advantage
Vast intellectual capital meets hi-tech leadership
As management consultants, IBM leads the marketplace with comprehensive implementation services and optimization modeling.

We also employ a powerful arsenal of IBM Business Partners and customer information system vendors. This means you can be better equipped for complex integrations without being locked into one vendor.

IBM and IBM Business Partners combine hardware, software and services to help:
  • Eliminate the need to evaluate multiple service providers.
  • Enable strong integration technology.
  • Empower you to be an on demand business, with the flexibility to respond to customers and new market conditions.

The benefits
Heighten control and quality of customer care
The IBM customer operations and strategy solution can help your utility company adapt quickly to business changes with:
  • Forward-looking decision support.
  • Flexibility to introduce new business rules in response to regulatory changes.
  • Ability to perform meaningful analytics and measurements of service performance based on call center data.
  • Manage complex rate systems and contracts.
  • Achieve visibility and management across functional and geographic boundaries.
  • Integrate multiple legacy customer information systems (CIS) as merger and acquisition strategies continue and energy portfolios grow.

Technology maintenance and development costs can contribute to overblown budgets and disparate information silos. But IBM technology can help you reduce costs and open the flow of information, enabling:
  • Customer self-service via Web technologies and interactive voice recognition (IVR).
  • Offsite or offshore customer care operations.
  • Move from fixed costs to variable costs.

Once your process and systems have been upgraded and streamlined, you can enhance your organization’s capabilities by outsourcing non-core functions.
  • Enables your business to focus on core competencies, including asset management, regulatory compliance and marketing.

The IBM customer operations and strategy solution also enables you to map out milestones and control risk using:
  • Consistent, integrated sources of data.
  • Rules-driven processing and reporting.
  • Integrity in customer care and performance metrics.

The approach
IBM helps mitigate merged customer information systems
Evansville, Indiana-based Vectren was the result of a merger between two companies, Southern Indiana Gas and Electric (SIGECO) and Indiana Gas Company (IGC). Vectren subsequently purchased the gas assets of Dayton Power and Light. The merger created several business challenges associated with achieving merger synergies, one of which was to consolidate the customer information systems that were operated separately for the three companies.

Vectren teamed with IBM to implement a customer relationship management contact center solution called SCT Banner CIS. Out of the National Center of Excellence for Energy and Utilities, IBM Application Management Services (AMS) provided project management services, system testing services, automated stress testing tools and processes, functional and technical architects, and business analysts. IBM Global Services - Integrated Technology Services (ITS) provided database administrator resources for developing database design, worked with the customer's Unix® administrators for optimizing solution configuration, maintained existing databases used for the solution and developed new databases for project team as needed for conversion, system testing, training and production.

The financial advantage
Put your dollars to work
IBM can help you reduce cost while enhancing customer service and achieving regulatory flexibility. But how would it impact your bottom line?

The IBM customer operations and strategy solution can help your business:
  • Deliver financial benefits during first year of operations.
  • Achieve a 40% return on investment in most cases as benefits overcome transition costs.
  • Reap business value on time and on budget with just two to six months for launch.
  • Reduce business and IT overhead costs.