Eskom: Customer Relationship Management

Recognising that customer service is a pillar of high performance, Eskom's Distribution Group turned to Accenture to help develop and implement a new customer relationship management strategy.

Eskom, the South African Government's electrical utility, is the seventh largest in the world in terms of generating capacity and sales. It provides more than 98 percent of South Africa's power and generates more than 50 percent of the electricity produced in Africa.

It comprises 24 power stations, a transmission grid of 27 026 km of line, 3.1 million customers, and 32 000 employees.

As the nation's premier source of power with responsibility for supporting an expanding economy and with ambitious goals to provide electricity for previously disadvantaged citizens, Eskom's Distribution Group is focused on achieving high performance.

Mastery of customer service is one of the cornerstones of high performance, and Eskom's Distribution Group wanted to develop and implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, supported by a modern telephony environment, to make it a world-class customer-centric organisation.

Eskom realised that CRM must form part of its broader strategic goals. Accordingly, it wanted to achieve the following:

• To create new processes, technologies and human performance strategies to facilitate improved customer response time and reduced call waiting.
• To position Eskom to help the government implement fundamental changes in the SA Electricity Distribution Industry.

In March 2001, Eskom began to develop a CRM capability blueprint, implementation plan and business case.

The operational problems identified included:

• Complex and ambiguous processes resulting in long call-handling times.
• Limited routing abilities and self-service options meant that customers were required to interact with a contact centre agent for rudimentary requests.
• Lack of feedback meant that customers kept phoning back for progress reports, adding to the call load.
• Limited integration and ineffective use of technology (such as enterprise workflow management and queue management) meant that business processes were not optimised.

Accenture leveraged its international experience in CRM as well as its deep knowledge of the utilities industry to help Eskom's Distribution Group develop a CRM capability blueprint that applied global best practice to local conditions.

The blueprint sought to capitalise on the existing skills present in Eskom's seven regional contact centres, using technology to provide integration between them and create a collaborative working environment. In particular, the Blueprint ensures that:

• The contact centre has ownership of requests, feedback and closure.
• Queries are matched with appropriate expertise for speedy resolution through skills-based routing.
• Communication between Eskom and its customers is facilitated through the use of multiple channels, such as e-mail, telephone, fax and Internet.
• Eskom has an integrated, single view of its customers with a high quality of service across all channels.

The implementation of the CRM capability blueprint has very specific goals, aimed at helping Eskom to realise significant financial benefits. More importantly, improved customer service enhances the corporation's longer-term business performance, helping to realise its ambition to be an African business of global stature.

Mastery of the customer service function is producing the following benefits for Eskom:

• Reduction in contact centre manpower costs: Fifty percent over five years.
• Reduction in connectivity costs: Forty-five percent over five years.
• Improved and consistent customer service experience.
• Improved call handling time: Reduced average call length of 5.25 minutes to 3-10 minutes.
• Improved call handling volume per agent: Number of calls per hour increases from 5.5 to 10-15 calls per hour.
• Improved service levels: Ninety percent of calls answered within 30 seconds as opposed to the current 75 percent.
• Reduction in abandoned calls: From 9.75 percent of incoming calls to 3 to 6 percent.
• Reduction in cost per call: Fifty to 60 percent.