| PacifiCorp: Improving customer satisfaction and minimizing cost |
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| The client |
| PacifiCorp is one of United States' lowest-cost electricity producers, with almost 1.5 million residential, commercial and industrial electric customers. Billing, at PacifiCorp produces about 19 million customer statements a year. |
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| The challenge |
| At PacifiCorp, the costs for processing, printing and mailing the customer billing statements were rising steadily for the past several years. The existing bill was designed to handle minimal information. With deregulation and other changes in the utility industry, the existing bill format was not sufficient to provide all the required information to the customers. The statements were therefore becoming very cryptic and unreadable. Coupling between the billing engine and the statement formatting software was so strong, that any changes made to the formatting software led to ripple effects on the billing engine. This caused an increase in the software development cost even for small changes in the format. |
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| The solution |
| Wipro participated with PacifiCorp in redesigning the customer statements and creating twenty eight prototypes to cater to the various flavors of customer statements. The business and calculation logic that was resident in PacifiCorp’s bill formatting application was moved to its billing engine, which now owns all the business processes. Statement processing and printing was outsourced to an external vendor which provided PacifiCorp the flexibility for future switching of formatting and print vendors. The messaging application which was not flexible was changed to a more user friendly GUI application. This has helped the CSE’s (Customer Service Engineers) to tailor specific messages on customer statements as and when required and view them before moving them into production. |
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| The benefits |
| The solution is targeted to help PacifiCorp reduce bill processing and printing cost by around US$ 1 million per year. The simplified and improved presentation of information in customer statements helped enhance customer satisfaction as well as enabled PacifiCorp meet regulatory requirements for bill presentation and collection of information. The solution also improved PacifiCorp’s internal business processes and their functional alignment. |
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