The complex mix of tariffs available coupled with customers reaching the end of an existing contract on a discontinued tariff means that unless the customer is switched on the date of renewal, complex and error-prone re-bills are necessary, causing confusion, potential customer dissatisfaction and unnecessary cost in this margin pressured industry. Using traditional middleware or batch

processing methodologies for this transition can be enormously costly and inflexible, as merger and acquisition activity means that many companies hold customer data across a large number of different systems, often working in parallel.

Blue Prism – improving customer management

The Blue Prism approach enables customers reaching the end of their current contract or requiring a tariff change to be effortlessly transitioned without delay by taking the normally manual steps associated with the change and packaging them into an operational solution.

A tariff renewal may involve a number of interactions with third parties or complex decisions, depending on the customer scenario.

Different tariffs, customer types, site variations, estimated reads and multiple meter situations all contribute to a situation where operations staff must wrestle a number of systems and calculations in order to calculate a final bill, issue and switch the customer.

In this complex environment, mistakes can be costly.  Mis-calculated reads can result in lost revenue, and under-staffing can ultimately result in backlogs and customers receiving back-dated bills with difficult to decipher workings.

Larger processes, like wholesale price changes, can be even worse, taking months to effect across a large customer base.

Using Blue Prism's operational agility platform, companies can turn their rules and procedures into complex workflows and action plans, re-purposing existing systems and functionality into new, flexible billing engines capable of running off large numbers or re-calculations and effective tariff changes effortlessly and with agile, parameter driven process flows.

Not only does this save staff and time, but the Blue Prism solution allows the organisation to quickly and effectively introduce new tariffs and contracts without a second thought, allowing the systems to do their job instead of dictating business decisions.

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