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September 27, 1999

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Such users can make payments at online pay-agent locations, which are primarily check-cashing stores, says Andrea Campbell, customer billing systems manager. The store owners are provided with a workstation, dial-up phone line, and online pay-agent software with an Internet connection. They sign on to the system once a day, remaining connected to Internet service providers with unlimited-access agreements. Payments-between $25,000 and $35,000 daily-are processed within seconds to Florida Power & Light's mainframe. Then, account-status information is fed back to the pay agent and the customer, including whether service will be reconnected or notices that collection actions will now be stopped. "This way, payments are up-to-the-minute," Gampfer says. "We don't ever want to disconnect a customer who's paid their bill."

According to Campbell, the system design focuses on transaction security, system reliability and redundancy, and immediate response time. By posting payments in real time and taking appropriate action on customer accounts immediately, the utility is able to eliminate customer calls and reduce operating costs.

Counting On Calls
The Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Tenn., points to a different initiative that's helping it to serve all its customers better. The company has implemented an automated energy-curtailment notification system to inform distributors or direct-serve customers with Interruptible Power Programs about energy curtailments in their areas due to system load, weather problems, or disasters. The system can call all such customers within 10 minutes, and will automatically inform TVA's billing systems of the change in contracts due to curtailment of surplus power purchases. The Windows NT system uses call servers to alert users of curtailments.

"A lot of IT departments do well when they have the technology and find business needs for it," says Mike Davis, senior VP of IT for TVA. "We identify the business need and supply the technology."

At Central and South West Corp. in Dallas, a utility that operates in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, enhancing customer call centers to provide faster and more-personalized responses was a high-priority task to keep clients from defecting as the industry moves toward deregulation.

Waldo Zerger Jr., VP of operations services at Central and South West, says the utility has spent the last two years merging four major phone centers and three small ones into a virtual phone center that can provide information to customers across all the states. It relied on computer-telephone integration, voice-response units, and switch technology to build the call-center infrastructure.

"We have an integrated system tied to analysis that's a vital link to problem determination," Zerger says. "It locates customers geographically. We're able to receive calls and provide customers with status. The system works especially well when there's an increase in volume during bad weather or disasters."

Central and South West is also preparing to meet competition by using data warehousing technology to capture and consolidate information about customers and its own business. Pulling together information from external and internal sources, Zerger says, is of the highest importance in a deregulated environment, where competitors are also business partners who sell energy to one another and purchase it from one another to maintain coverage during peak periods.

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