Energy

40% to 65% of Billing Exceptions Could be Automated with Blue Prism

Industry metering data, billing validation, changing regulations and customer switching are all causes of business exceptions that require costly manual intervention in a customer service back office. RWE npower recognised this and found a new way to automate their Disputed Meter Reads processes even though they were in the middle of a major SAP implementation, as you can see in the RWE npower case study.

Have you tried to automate these types of processes? Our experience shows that most customer services teams have large numbers of change requests for automation that cannot be fulfilled because of limitation on resources and budgets. Driven by seasonal peaks, competitive and regulatory pressures these change requests place significant operational demands on the back office.

We call this the "long tail" of change and it can represent up to 40% to 65% of the total automation opportunity. Traditional IT approaches are limited in how deep and how economically they can tackle the long tail and many automation requests are deemed too small or too urgent to make it onto the core IT program.

Until now the only alternatives available were: Local workarounds, new staff, off-shoring or outsourcing. But what if the business could deliver its own solutions? Using Blue Prism software, for the first time, business users are able to safely configure automations and, crucially the required integrations without the need for specialist IT involvement.

This dramatically changes the speed and cost at which automations can be implemented and only uses existing business resources, thus not impacting major IT change programs

"We are already seeing a number of benefits since project completion and have fully realised our objective of moving employees away from manual, repetitive tasks into customer facing roles. We're now in a stronger position to provide our customers with the best possible levels of customer service," Dave Ford, Head of Transformation, RWE npower.

Blue Prism has built up a considerable depth of knowledge and experience working with leading energy companies over several years, delivering proven solutions that help customer service operations tackle the long tail of change, and deliver automations which complement existing major transformation programs.