Aclara Bill Analysis
Driving costs down - and satisfaction up
The bill is at the center of utility-customer communications. Yet, research has shown that customers are frustrated by bills that are focused on energy terms they can't understand. Typical utility bills speak the utility's - not the customers' - language. The result - lower customer satisfaction, more customer calls and higher customer service costs.
The Aclara Bill Analysis changes the billing experience, and provides customers with more meaningful information to help them understand, compare, and manage their bills. Designed to provide the information customers need so they do not have to contact the utility - and to quickly answer the most common billing questions when they do - the Aclara Bill Analysis can reduce the number of calls as well as time-on-call, and provide customers with a more satisfactory experience.
Aclara Bill Analysis Provides the Solution
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Through personalized, intelligent analysis, Aclara Bill Analysis can:
- Reduce billing confusion, by summarizing the most important bill information in language customers understand.
- Answer billing questions before a call is generated, by highlighting key elements of the bill and reasons for change.
- Fully explain to customers why their bill has changed and why it is different from their neighbors, satisfying the most common inquiries.
- Highlight the benefits of the energy dollar for heating, cooling, hot water, etc...
helping to support the utility's value proposition.
- Add value to on-line bill presentment, providing customers with a compelling
reason to go on-line to view and pay bills.
Aclara Bill Analysis combines "intelligent" presentment of billing information with utility-authorable content and unique interactive tools to help answer even the most difficult billing-related questions.
Aclara Bill Analysis:
- Provides customers with highlights of their bill, including reasons for changes, a breakdown of where their energy dollars are going, and targeted offers of products, services, or rates that make sense for them. By proactively providing this information, customers have less reason to call. In fact, one utility reported a 90% lower call rate from customers who reviewed their bill online.
- Helps users understand why their bills have changed - identifying the impact of factors such as billing cycles, the weather, or increased appliance usage - and answers questions such as: "How does my home compare to my neighbor's?"
- Goes beyond traditional on-line bill histories to help customers really understand, by offering special views like a year-to-year side-by-side comparison, and graphs of usage overlaid with heating and cooling degree days.
- Provides authorable Aclara Bill Analysis that explains, in the consumer’s language, what makes up a utility bill and all aspects of billing specific to the local needs of the client utility.
- Offers seamless integration with the Energy Center to enable customers concerned about their bills to find better ways to manage them.
- Directly integrates load profiles so that customers get an integrated view of their usage and costs, and delivers several tools that help customers benefit from the data, including:
- A rates calculator that lets customers know how they would have fared on different rates
- Bill-to-date calculation at any time in the month
- A bill highlight that alerts time of use customers of a shift from off-peak to peak usage
- A load shift calculator that identifies strategies for shifting usage from the peak to the off-peak
The Aclara Bill Analysis Self-Service Channel has demonstrated the ability to reduce call volumes and increase customer satisfaction.
The Aclara Bill Analysis Contact Center Channel provides an optimized interface for CSRs that puts all the information they need to handle bill inquiries at their fingertips, allowing calls to be handled more quickly and CSRs to have greater confidence. The application has resulted in demonstrable increases in first call resolution and reductions in call handling time.
Additional Channels
The Aclara Bill Analysis Value-Added Print Bill offers much of the value on the on-line application to the print bill. By directing customers on-line for more detail, the printed bill can also help drive customers to on-line for bill presentment, payment and more.
Aclara Bill Analysis functionality can also be made available through ENERGYgrams® — Aclara Software's unique e-newsletter program, to proactively address billing issues and further reduce the customer's need to call.