An important element of Accenture Utilities BPO Service's Customer Care operations is the handling of billing, meter reading and other Customer Information System exception work. An exception is anything that needs attention outside of the normal flow of customer billing: a wrong meter reading, a bad credit card, service that was not properly canceled, etc.

Further, there is a tremendous amount of paper, Email and fax correspondence that must be dealt with in a timely manner to meet customer Service Level Agreement metrics. The current process for distributing, assigning, managing and tracking back-office exception and correspondence work is extremely manually intensive. Accenture Business Services for Utilities wanted to reduce its operational costs by reducing manual effort and enhancing the overall efficiency of its services while improving customer satisfaction.

Accenture Utilities BPO Services believed that Microsoft had the technology to help them improve their service and lower the cost of providing their operations. Avanade was selected for this important task based on their unmatched .NET application development and integration expertise.

The solution Avanade created was named the Workflow Management Application (WMA). The WMA utilizes Microsoft’s BizTalk Server 2004 as well as .NET technologies to enable Accenture Business Services for Utilities to more effectively distribute back-office work to their employees through an automated workflow solution. For both back-office exceptions and correspondence, the workflow solution will track the status of the work from initiation through to completion.

The primary benefit of this solution is a significant reduction of the effort and costs associated with manually distributing, assigning, managing and tracking the back-office exception and correspondence work. In the first three and a half months after the deployment, the WMA successfully processed 70,643 exceptions, a number that the company can confidently use to accurately determine their staffing needs. With the investment they’ve made to easily integrate new clients into their environment and deliver more value more quickly, this company believes they now have one more unique capability that will help increase their growth.