According to Netflix, 75 percent of the content consumed by customers is actually suggested or recommended by Netflix analytics. Amazon, likewise, uses predictive analytics to anticipate its customers’ purchases and ships products to regional facilities before the customer even buys it.
The impact of predictive analytics is consistently high customer satisfaction and loyalty, despite the highly competitive marketplace. In fact, according to the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index’s retail sector report, Netflix has a customer satisfaction score of 79 percent.
Utilities, by contrast, have historically had little incentive to innovate in the same way. But utility customers are also Netflix and Amazon customers and, as a result, have come to expect increasing levels of exceptional customer service tailored to their unique needs.
Happier customers create a better bottom line.
In a Bloomberg Businessweek research report, it was revealed that process companies in the utilities sector lead the pack of global industries in expected big data investment returns, with a 73 percent return in 2013.
Even in the case of an outage, when customers are most distraught, there is still an opportunity within analytics. Many of those customers can be channeled to a website or automated phone system to receive the answers they want. Yet a recent 2014 study by Booz Allen found that just 26 percent of utilities even have a mobile app, reflecting the ongoing hesitation of many utilities to embrace technology that can dramatically impact their bottom lines.
Because utilities have even more incentive to improve their systems due to the high demand for immediate and seamless customer service, it is beneficial to get ahead of the curve and seize the many opportunities that come with predictive analytics. VertexOne can alleviate the hesitation utilities face and deliver a predictive analytics software that drastically improves not only the customer experience, but the feedback given by customers to utilities as well. With VertexOne’s predictive analytics being offered as a service, it’s even easier for utilities to add the software on to their current system.
Make the most of consumer data.
Utilities have rightly been concerned with the cost and time involved to implement new technology like advanced speech analytics, as well as the skills needed to operate them. VertexOne offers customer-oriented analytics as a service, so utilities are up, running and gaining insight in as little as a couple of months. And our consulting services ensure utilities get the return on their investment.
As we describe in our Speech Analytics for Utilities brochure, listening and responding to the “voice of the customer” via speech analytics is becoming an indispensable capability for the best-run contact centers.
The return on investment is there.
Visualize a highly effective phone call that can eliminate sending a technician to a customer’s location to root out a problem. Instead, the customer’s needs are anticipated by automated voice prompts on the telephone or through web interaction, preventing the need for live agent conversation at all.
For utilities dealing with an ever-increasing influx of data, the sheer amount and variety of information can either be overwhelming or overlooked. Analytics tools combined with expert consulting services provide a way to gather all the data and to spin it into a golden opportunity.
