SourceGas: Earning Customer Satisfaction Through Call Center Powered by SAP Software

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1 SourceGas: Earning Customer Satisfaction Through Call Center Powered by SAP Software Partner

2 SourceGas Industry Oil and gas Products and Services Natural gas Web Site SAP s SAP Customer Relationship Management application SAP Business Communications Management software Partners SAP Consulting organization ecenta AG SourceGas aims for exceptional customer service. That s why it brought an outsourced call center in-house and adopted the SAP Customer Relationship Management application and SAP Business Communications Management software. Since going live in 2009, it s managed to cut call-handling times in half. It also commissioned an independent survey of customer satisfaction. The provider stated that not one of its clients in the past 15 years had produced steady upward trends and results as outstanding as SourceGas. 2

3 Leading its market segment SourceGas is a natural gas distributor headquartered in Golden, Colorado. The company and its affiliates serve nearly 410,000 customers. They operate 17,940 miles of pipeline along with storage facilities in Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. SourceGas and its affiliates provide gas transport, sales and service for in-home heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning appliances. They also offer gas-commodity sales services. 410,000 customers 3

4 Aiming for exceptional customer service The SourceGas mission is to be the premier energy provider in the communities that it serves. We have what we call our mission, vision, and principles or MVP statement, says Steve Bandy, director of the customer care center at SourceGas. The company s overarching mission is to be the source for safe and reliable natural gas. Its vision is to provide exceptional customer service, a challenging and fulfilling work environment, and investor value for owners. Its principles are geared around demonstrating safety and ensuring the well-being and success of its employees. SourceGas realized that an in-house call center, which it established in Fayetteville, Arkansas, could improve customer service a critical need in today s utility environment. SourceGas offers customers in Nebraska and Wyoming the ability to choose their natural gas supplier on an annual basis. That way customers can choose the supplier that best meets their service and pricing requirements. Approximately 40% of SourceGas retail customers can choose their natural gas provider. We wanted to get our call center back in-house so we could better control the quality of our customer service. 4

5 Seeing advantage in a single vendor SourceGas had already implemented the SAP ERP application and wanted the advantages of dealing with a single solution provider. We began deploying the software in the financial area but had to address other needs, Bandy said. We went with SAP Business Communications Management software and the SAP Customer Relationship Management application to avoid working with multiple vendors. If we had issues, we knew it would be much easier working with one entity. That said, SourceGas also liked the SAP software s flexibility. The nice thing about SAP Business Communications Management is that we can automate the handling of routine inquiries and set priorities for various issues, says Bandy. And if for some reason we need to make a change in the system as to how the calls are prioritized, we can do so easily and quickly. Scalability was another differentiator. According to Bandy, if the company bought another firm and had to set up a call center, it could easily go from 100 agents to as many as were needed with SAP Business Communications Management. We can run the SAP software to support 100,000 customers or 5 million customers, without much more than additional licenses. That scalability is one of the biggest reasons we went with SAP software. 5

6 Speeding the rollout with expert partners SourceGas emphasized stakeholder participation during the rollout. The company brought together key people from across each state to work on the blueprint and design, Bandy says. I flew out to Lakewood every week for several months; other people came in from elsewhere. This team approach enabled us to create a solution based on how we did business. The stakeholders worked quickly. We completed the installation ahead of schedule and within budget, Bandy says. Everyone was telling us it was going to take 18 to 24 months. We successfully launched the center in 11 months. SourceGas credits both SAP Consulting and SAP specialist ecenta AG for helping it achieve that success. The SAP consultants came in and showed us how the SAP Customer Relationship Management application ran, while ecenta focused on SAP Business Communications Management, Bandy says. Having that expertise allowed us to implement the software more quickly. We were grateful to have such excellent support. The partners not only had technical and functional proficiency they had industry knowledge. There were a number of consultants with a utility background, Bandy says. That really helped. SAP Consulting took the expertise it had gained from numerous rollouts and helped us make our project a success. 6

7 Achieving new flexibility SAP Business Communications Management provides an all-ip communications solution for multichannel contact centers and contact-intensive multisite organizations. It replaces traditional communications hardware with a software-based IP telephony solution to help make interactions with customers and partners more effective. Unified queuing, prioritizing, and routing of contacts ensures a smooth, consistent experience. Customers calling SourceGas respond to prompts from an integrated voice response (IVR) menu. When a caller makes a selection clarifying his or her need, the person is routed to the appropriate Our agents access scripts to market our services to customers, talking them through the benefits of our programs. Steve Bandy, Director, Customer Care Center, SourceGas agent, who clicks a box on the screen to pick up the call. The solution immediately populates a window with the caller s originating number. The software also searches to see if it can identify the customer, and if so, brings up customer data, most current activity, and outstanding issues. Agents are trained to handle all calls. We have training documents online if agents need to refresh their knowledge, Bandy says. We also tailored the solution so they can pull up information and scripts, such as for our appliance protection programs. They can quickly see what the plans are, how to set them up, and if the customer has had them before. That s led to more business. Says Bandy, Last month we had a drive to sell our customer appliance protection program in three states. We set a goal for the month; we reached it by the middle of the second week. We ended up selling double our original goal. 7

8 Reporting service levels every hour With its call center in-house, SourceGas can now answer 90% of emergency calls within 10 seconds; average speed is 7 seconds. Our average speed for responding to general queries is 27 seconds across all our states, with a less than 2% abandonment rate, Bandy says. SourceGas uses SAP Business Communications Management to report on service levels each hour. It displays the results over the course of the day and continuously updates its weekly metrics to ensure its people are meeting targets. We linked service-level tracking to a dashboard in the call center to show the hourly updates, Bandy says. SourceGas is also using reports to identify agent training needs by examining the reasons why customers are calling. The result is better job satisfaction and lower turnover. We noticed that we were teaching the reps so much in class that they didn t fully understand the system, Bandy says. When we analyzed our customer calls, we started just training new agents on payments and collections, which were the primary call drivers. Once the agents became familiar with the system, we did the other training. Our turnover rate dropped from 60% to 30%. The SAP software is very flexible. It enables us to route our service-level reports and format them so supervisors and floor agents can see the numbers instantly. 8

9 SourceGas Refining the solution, integrating Verint SourceGas continues to refine the SAP software based solution at the call center. Agents like the way the company includes them in the process. Bandy explains, Each agent group picks a person to gather that team s information and concerns. We meet every four to six weeks. We listen to their problems; that s how we figure out our next enhancement. It s not management thinking this is a good idea it s the voice of the reps. And these call agents are our link to our customers. SourceGas is also working to further integrate Verint Systems Inc. offerings with SAP Business Communications Management. Verint is a global leader in actionable intelligence solutions and value-added services. Its solutions capture, distill, and analyze complex and underused information sources (such as voice, video, and unstructured text) to help organizations make timely and effective decisions. SourceGas uses Verint s Impact 360 Speech Analytics system to automatically record and mine customer interactions. This helps it pinpoint issues, trends, and opportunities. Says Bandy, The other day we were getting heavy volume in our billing and services queues. We used the speech analytics functionality to discover the cause. SAP Business Communications Management and SAP Customer Relationship Management give us the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of call agents and customers. CMP12677 (12/04) Copyright/Trademark Privacy Impressum 9