Utility Industry Would Benefit From Building Strong Mobile Customer Service Platforms
April 24, 2013
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
The explosion of mobile apps for everything from customer service to entertainment to medical monitoring is fueling a market that seems to know no economic limits. A recent report from market analyst firm Canalys found that the top four app stores collectively hit 13.4 billion downloads worldwide in the first quarter of 2013, representing an 11-percent increase overall in 2012.
“Apps have had a huge impact on the way consumers use mobile devices, what they value, and what they expect from smart phones and tablets. They are now central to how consumers engage with content and connected services, and how they personalize their devices around the app-enabled features that are important to them,” said Adam Daum, Canalys chief analyst of Analytics, in a statement. “This is a multi-billion-dollar growth market, with more and more consumers around the world now comfortable and confident in finding apps, downloading them and making in-app purchases, on a growing addressable base of smart phones and tablets.”
One of the major new growth areas for mobile apps is the mobile payment industry, and utilities have begun to build these types of mobile apps in earnest. According to a Chartwell Inc. study, 70 percent of utilities have or are seriously considering deploying mobile alerts, mobile e-bills and mobile bill pay services to their customers.
The number of American consumers who no longer have landline phones, relying instead on mobile phones only, is growing. It makes sense for utility companies to put effort into building a mobile customer service and m-commerce strategy.
Power Grid International recently wrote that for utility companies, the billing process is the most frequent touch point with customers, and this billing process provide a key opportunity to make the transition to a paperless relationship. Skipping the paper bills and moving to an e-payment platform can reduce a utility company’s expenses as much as 50 cents per bill per month, according to BlueFlame Consulting. Currently, 88 percent of utility customers, on average, still receive paper bills.
While many utilities offer some kind of mobile strategy, experts say they are still too unreliable and inconsistent to inspire much consumer confidence. In order to induce customers to move to a paperless process, they must feel confident that they will receive the information they require and have the means to follow up with questions and concerns as well as pay securely. For starters, companies need to ensure that the mobile apps they offer customers are directly tied to the contact center via the utility’s interactive voice response (IVR) solution. Customers need to understand that their mobile transactions aren’t heading into a black hole, but are inextricably linked to the contact center, just as with any other customer media channel.
This might involve using a single administrative tool to manage all payment options, which would also eliminate additional training for customer care representatives that otherwise would be required, according to Power Grid International.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey