Improve Billing Without Replacing CIS

You need new capabilities, not a new CIS

Many energy companies have implemented new CIS systems over the past few years to address issues such as Y2K, deregulation and mergers.

Today, most companies recognize that CIS systems are optimized to handle the meter to cash cycle, and even many of the older ones do that just fine. It is in other areas – such as effective support for CSRs – that these systems break down.

But, it is possible to address these problems without replacing the CIS, at much lower cost.

Aclara Software offers comprehensive solutions that can fill in the gaps found with most CIS systems:

On-Line Customer Service - Vendors of newer CIS systems promote their ability to make billing data available on-line – although what they really mean is that they can expose the data, and you can build an application. Moreover, all this accomplishes is to duplicate the paper bill experience that customers don’t understand. Our customer-facing ENERGYprism^® applications transforms the customer experience, providing more meaningful information to help them understand, compare, and manage their bills. This has resulted in increased customer satisfaction, lower customer service costs, and higher adoption of on-line bill presentment and payment.
Customer Service in the Call Center - Bill inquiries are the most common and expensive calls, yet, most CIS systems don’t do an effective job of presenting information that CSRs and customers need to get questions answered. Our ENERGYprism customer care solutions provide unique analytic tools with an optimized user interface to quickly and satisfactorily address customer bill inquires, resulting in higher first call resolution, shorter calls, and higher customer and CSR satisfaction.
Enhanced Paper Bill - Much of the value-added information that Aclara’s ENERGYprism customer care solutions put online can be added to the Paper Bill. Find out why one customer wrote: "I could never understand the old bills. I always thought that we used a lot of electricity until I saw the Graph & the ’How my Home Compares’. I love the new bills and hope they are here to stay. I would hate to have to go back to the old bills."
Complex Billing - Most CIS systems were never designed to handle complex bills for C&I customers or for generation, transmission or distribution billing. That’s why most energy companies to this day rely upon spreadsheets and other quasi-manual processes, or difficult to support custom or 3rd party software. Aclara Software’s Complex Billing leverages a powerful, flexible engine that enables the business analyst to add rates with no programming, maintains a complete audit trail for SOX compliance, provides complete billing work flow, and can be integrated with your CIS for invoice preparation.

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