The Unexpected Hero: Discover How a Retail Utility Provider is Providing a Better Customer Experience

This post highlights the story of TXU Energy, the #1 retail provider of electricity in the state of Texas, and its road to better customer experience management (CEM). TXU is an electric utility company headquartered in Dallas, Texas with over 2 million customers.

What Was TXU’s Challenge?

In 1996, TXU became the largest provider of electricity and natural gas in the state of Texas. In 2002, Texas deregulated its electric market. As a result, TXU was forced to participate in a statewide competition against more than 200 such retail electricity providers.

What did all of this mean for TXU? Essentially two factors separated TXU from its competitors: (1.) price and (2.) customer satisfaction.

TXU needed a complete solution that would provide it with the visibility across all critical business processes, including the new customer enrollment process (known as the “Move-In Process”). This would ensure a better customer experience.

Before Vitria Came Into the Picture

TXU had explored many alternatives to solve this challenge with its existing SAP CRM and Billing applications for quite some time.

Although its SAP solution aided the flow of information between all business groups inside the organization, it didn’t fully provide the level of granularity and visualization that TXU was looking for. Our solution complemented SAP quite well by providing this added functionality.

How Vitria Came Into the Picture

Sendero Business Services, a Dallas-based consulting firm, realized the potential of our M3O Operational Intelligence Suite to aid TXU (which is how we became “the unexpected hero”). Sendero proved helpful not only in the initial introduction, but all throughout the execution and delivery of the project.

Through a Pilot Program we immediately helped TXU improve its Move-In Process. Our Pilot Program was deployed and results were so quickly obtained that the functional business users were left astonished.

We’d be happy to create such a Pilot Program for you, too. Simply request a demo here.

After Vitria Came Into the Picture

So what results did TXU obtain?:

  1. Gained real-time visibility of KPI’s to manage the Move-In Process
  2. Reduced the time to identify and correct customer contract errors
  3. Reduced the time to resolve enrollment errors (from hours to minutes)
  4. Integrated successfully with the existing applications

Checkout an interview by TXU CIO Kevin Chase to get a behind-the-scenes look at the exact results we obtained.

Bottom Line

The TXU story is a great example of the power of OI with regards to CEM. It exemplifies discovering (and alleviating) problems before customers take notice.

What are your thoughts about OI and CEM?

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