Utility Providers

Utility providers often have two ‘call center’ environments. The consumer customer service center operates as a traditional call center. It must deliver quality customer service to a large installed base, to ensure customer retention and, more importantly, to ensure customer safety.

The second call center, the ‘control center’ or ‘network operating center’, is typically not thought of as a call center, but provides services internally for managing facilities and staff. They deal daily with high priority incoming calls that change in priority moment to moment – from dispatching safety teams to dealing cost effectively with technicians on site. Some calls may be short and informational, while others may take hours and involve multiple parties to resolve issues.

Utility Solutions

Upstream Works can provide solutions that meet the disparate needs of the service call center, the dispatch call center, and the control center. All solutions use the same base technology, so adding in the specialty centers is incremental to the larger consumer center solution.

Agent Desktop

Although the bulk of calls are billing inquiries and for moves, some calls are related to safety issues such as wires down or carbon monoxide problems –areas where human lives can be put at risk. With our solutions, safety related or priority calls can be routed to the head of the queue. Alternately, they can presented to the agent in a visual ‘take’ mode, providing visibility of safety issues to agents even while they are on the phone with other customers.

We capture contact knowledge associated with each household or corporate customer, and relate them to the appropriate billing and service records. By capturing the caller’s unique billing number, we can identify the caller, determine the reason for their call and ensure they are dealt with appropriately by the best agent while automating and streamlining the agent interaction.

System Operations

The systems operations group lives off of the unusual. Often a technician is working with a field counterpart, or dealing with emergency priorities. These critical calls need to be answered live, limiting the benefits of a traditional ACD system.

Our Visual Queue solution can provide a display of all waiting calls, color coded and labeled with priority, caller identification and call reason. Technicians click on their display to select the most important call. As calls ‘stack up’ in the queue, the calls are reprioritized, so that they always see at a glance who is waiting and what is required.