Leading Convergent Utilities Provider: Billing Operations

The client is a leading utilities provider offering convergent services such as local and long-distance, high-speed Internet, wireless and print and Internet directory services. After divestiture, the utilities provider encountered challenges with its conversion to a new billing system. These issues led to decreased customer satisfaction, higher customer churn and lost revenue.

The company sought Accenture's assistance to address the immediate billing operations and customer service challenges and to automate and improve their billing processes for better long-term performance.

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The client had been divested from a much larger entity, and was experiencing a host of challenges related to its conversion to a new billing system. For instance, a large number of customer orders had been lost or mishandled, and many customers had been billed incorrectly or had not been billed at all for extended periods of time. These challenges, in turn, contributed to decreased customer satisfaction, higher customer churn and lost revenue.

Company executives chose Accenture for a variety of reasons, including Accenture’s deep billing experience, robust functional knowledge, solution architecture and project management skills, and application development and maintenance experience. Additionally, the company appreciated Accenture’s outsourcing capacity.

The company hired Accenture to stabilize the operations of its new billing system and help it provide improved customer service levels for the foreseeable future.

The Accenture team defined two major phases for the project:

• Addressing the company’s immediate billing and customer service challenges
• Automating and improving the company’s billing processes for improved long-term performance

To address the company’s near-term challenges as rapidly as possible, Accenture developed a comprehensive plan to help stabilize billing production operations, resolve post-conversion data integrity issues and recover lost revenue. The Accenture team also helped the company identify and resolve instances of over-billing, as well as recover lost revenue from customers who had been under-billed.

Once Accenture had helped stabilize the provider’s billing system, Accenture focused on automating the company’s billing processes and improving its long-term performance by:

• Automating approximately 80 percent of the company’s operational and revenue reporting processes, as well as its recurring production job functions and processes.

• Performance-tuning bill transformation job functions to reduce bill cycle transformation execution time.

• Utilizing its Application Programming Interface Invoker solution to repair billing accounts in Kenan and process Kenan orders in bulk.

• Implementing a self-serve solution for the company’s billing operations team to help the client complete critical billing projects more efficiently.

This array of enhancements has helped the company improve the speed, efficiency and quality of its billing processes. For example, the client has reduced both its bill cycle execution time and its bill cycle transformation execution time by 22 percent and 38 percent, respectively.

With its billing process stabilized and improved, the company has been able to focus on implementing marketing and IT initiatives to win customers back, increase customer satisfaction and roll out new products and services to increase its customer base and revenue.

In sum, Accenture helped this convergent utilities provider measurably improve one of its most mission-critical processes—its billing operations. In turn, the client has boosted its efficiency and customer responsiveness, and it has uncovered lost revenue that it was due.