MECOMS Customer Care More than CRM. By Johan Crols. Copyright 2012 Ferranti Computer Systems. All rights reserved

Whitepaper MECOMS Customer Care More than CRM By Johan Crols Copyright 2012 Ferranti Computer Systems. All rights reserved

3 Customer Care or CRM? CRM, or Customer Relationship Management is defined by Wikipedia as processes implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers. In the nineties, the world was buzzing with CRM implementations. However, a lot of those implementations didn t succeed, because CRM is no goal per se: CRM is all about caring for your customers, and putting them in the center of everything you do. It should be part of your DNA. If not, implementing a CRM system will not live up to the expectations. Customer care in its turn can be defined as a phrase that is used to describe the process of taking care of our customers in a positive manner. Is it then the same as CRM? No, clearly not. CRM could be described as the behavior leading to good customer care. But in reality, CRM is much more. About the author Johan Crols is a seasoned utilities executive. As director Product Management, he plays a key role in defining the MECOMS product and its roadmap. Johan previously headed the B2C department at Essent Belgium, a subsidiary of RWE. Before that, he led numerous projects at utility companies, as a consultant for Accenture and CSC. A question of definitions Most often, CRM is defined as the sales and service processes that revolve around the core business of a company. In its most narrow definition, CRM includes: Sales support (keeping track of contacts, enabling the sales process, field force enablement, ), Marketing support (planning, executing & follow up of marketing campaigns), Contact Center Support (enabling contact center agents by giving them a full customer information overview In broader definitions, CRM also encompasses: Customer insight (insights into customer data, that improve business efficiency and / or customer care), Customer billing & servicing (all communications going out to the customer, including monthly or yearly bills and / or other service communication) johan.crols@ferranti.be T: +32 3 5404903

4 MECOMS as a customer care system MECOMS is a business support system for energy and utility companies. It covers 2 main areas: MDM, or Meter Data Management, and CIS, or Customer Information System. CIS is Gartner s abbreviation for a customer care and billing system, using the aforementioned terminology. It covers the full customer lifecycle from customer provisioning (contracting), over billing (enabling complex pricing) to payment processing including dunning support. The system is fully customer oriented, and supports the definition of Customer Care in the broadest sense. But there s more or as a CRM solution? Since MECOMS is aimed at excelling in customer service, at a low cost-to-serve, our solution goes further than only contracting customers, making bills and ensuring those get paid. Although one might argue that those processes are core for a utility company ensuring cash flow, customer care as well as sales need to be at the heart of every employee. Every contact, every interaction should breathe both. And therefore, MECOMS includes CRM functionality that enables exactly this. The MECOMS CRM module lets you register all possible customer information and use it throughout all your business processes. Complaints and questions can be logged, tracked, traced, resolved and reported upon to take action where needed. The powerful and user-friendly 360 cockpit views give the users a complete overview of the customer including his connections, meter readings, bills, payments, contracts and on-going market transactions. Giving your users such powerful tools allows them to use their time to the fullest extent and achieve a high first-time-resolution rate. But also the pure sales processes (CRM in its narrowest definition) are supported: lead and opportunity management, sales process support, campaign management etc. are part of our integrated solution.

5 Since MECOMS is built on top of Microsoft Dynamics AX, it fully integrates with native CRM functionality that is available within the standard ERP package. The advantages of both combined are very powerful: The energy and utilities entities enable a true one view of the customer All MDM and CIS information and processes are fully integrated, from marketing campaigns over prospecting to contracting, billing and collecting payments Sales Management The Sales Management module supports the sales process, by setting sales targets for individuals or sales units, and tracking the efficiency of the sales and quotations process. Marketing Automation MECOMS allows you to design marketing campaigns, defining things like targets and media types, and enables you to follow up its results. At the end of the day, incurred costs can be compared with budgets, and deltas can be easily analysed. Service management, asset management, inventory management and other classic ERP functionalities are fully integrated with the utility-specific processes Sales Force automation The Sales Force Automation functionality supports pre-sales and sales activities within your company: Lead management, enabling your sales teams to collect and store information about leads and develop sales activities and tasks that qualify leads into opportunities Opportunity management, enabling the sales teams to create, develop and close sales deals Contact management, including recording of business contacts (different than customer contact management) Quotation Management, enabling you to generate quotes towards prospects; MECOMS contains a state-of-the-art quoting engine, modelling the same tariffs and rate structures that will be used in billing. It is workflow-powered and enables full auditing and version control. Furthermore, it is deeply integrated with our MECOMS Market Messaging Module Telemarketing Telemarketing is just one of the channels that can be used to execute a marketing campaign. Once the campaign has been defined, call lists can be automatically created, and outbound calls can be automatically placed. Letters or emails can be sent out, including self-service options. The results can be easily fed back to the campaign follow up, and they are of course visible in MECOMS, should the prospect or customer call back later.

6 360 cockpits Because of the integrated nature of our MECOMS solution, all data resides in the same application, in a single centralised database. The MECOMS 360 cockpit screens offer their users a complete overview of all vital customer information, including meter reading and consumption data, invoices, payments, market transactions and cases. This complete overview, a single-stop-shop where all relevant information is centrally available, enables users to quickly resolve cases and boost first-call, first-time-right and first-line resolution. Scripting Everytime a customer reaches out to your customer service department, you should make sure that the right things happen. This includes grabbing every opportunity to combine sales with service. And MECOMS allows both: the scripting functionality can automate and streamline contact handling. It ensures that not only the right things happen, but also that things happen in the right way. Combining upor cross-sell opportunities into regular call taking is a piece of cake, since the scripting engine will feed every contact center agent the right information, and propose cross- or upselling opportunities, based on the specific customer s situation. Contact & complaint Management The MECOMS solution has expanded the basic Dynamics AX functionality with powerful additions, such as: automatic and configurable allocation and escalation flows, the possibility to link multiple cases together and create a workflow of tasks and activities to resolve a case, attaching documents and enabling users to define Service Level Agreements on the different case types, categories and topics. Customer Communication Every contact counts. Whether you reach out to the customer or the customer reaches out to you. Next to the specific contact center functionalities like scripting and 360 cockpits, MECOMS contains customer self-service solutions: the out-of-the-box portal enables customers to check their consumptions, view their bills etc. The Document framework enables you to send out any type of pre-defined template-based communication, in any step of the process. Whether it is to confirm a contact, or send a brochure along with a contract extension, or to inform your customer about an outage. It s all possible with MECOMS. Customer insight At the end of the day, what counts is bringing the right products to the right customers, and delivering the correct service. Gaining insight in customers behaviours, combined with process insight, has proven to be a very tough challenge for many of the established players in today s energy market. Having information spread out over dozens of systems, having exports of all these systems needing to work together to come up with the extract, transform and load processes to consolidate all this information in a data warehouse has been proven to be a very costly and time consuming use of their resources. We believe that this view on the business is necessary for all types of businesses. Whether you re a new market entrant or an established player, you can only sustain your business or grow if you can make informed decisions on the direction you want to take. We believe that having a single, integrated, solution is the best way to keep your processes under control. We believe that having this insight in your business should be affordable, even if you ve just started doing business. And we believe that MECOMS, with its out-of-the box BI cubes gives you this insight and helps you make your business a success.

7 The advantages of an integrated solution As said before, a lot of CRM implementations were unsuccessful, because of the lack of mentality shift. But there was another reason Often, CRM solutions are implemented as best of breed. This means that a separate CRM solution is implemented for core CRM tasks (like prospect handling or contact center handling), and interfaced with the back-office system for handling billing and payment management. This often proved to be, in addition to be very costly, very unsuccessful. Reasons are multiple: differences in data models making data synchronisation tedious, not all information gets synchronised correctly, duplicate data exists, information is not up-to-date, impossibility to call up functionality from one system to another etc. And of course MECOMS could be interfaced with other CRM systems, but why should you? MECOMS has all CRM functionality available and it is integrated in one system. No data duplication, no synchronisation, all information is only stored once, all processes can be started from anywhere in the system And all of this works out of the box! Conclusion As you see, MECOMS includes all functionality you need to be able to identify your best customers, go after them, contract them, send them bills, ensure payment and give them an impeccable customer service. At the lowest cost to serve. Was there anything else you were looking for? And what about other functionality that is part of bestof-breed solutions, and not available in the standard AX + MECOMS pack? Well, you ll have to make the balance, since those packages might have more bells and whistles, but are non-utility-specific, leaving you with a lot of work tweaking the standard functionality to work for your specific utility processes. On the other hand, with Microsoft Dynamics AX as the platform for our MECOMS solution, we have all the tools (rapid development environment, service oriented architecture, SOAP and REST compatibility) to create additional interfaces. Say for example with social media sites and networks, in an integrated way, working as a part of the MECOMS solution and reacting on events and triggers typical for the energy market.

Global contact info@mecoms.com www.mecoms.com Antwerp, Belgium info@mecoms.be Oberhausen, Germany info@mecoms.de Gurgaon, India info@mecoms.in Singapore, Singapore info@mecoms.com.sg Amsterdam, The Netherlands info@mecoms.nl London, United Kingdom info@mecoms.co.uk MECOMS CRM whitepaper V1.0 2012 Ferranti Computer Systems NV, all rights reserved. MECOMS is a trademark of Ferranti Computer Systems NV. Microsoft and Microsoft Dynamics AX are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.