StreamServe Utilities™

Much More than Cash Flow Rides on Your Bills

Almost everyone thinks of billing only in terms of providing payment information to customers. In fact, it affects everything from the ROI of IT to the relationships with regulators, directors, and shareholders. Modernized billing capabilities can reduce operational costs, as well as drive incremental revenue for those utilities that offer a portfolio of services.

The most visible benefit of adopting StreamServe Utilities is vastly improved bills that help customers clearly understand what they've consumed and the associated costs. These bills also provide an easily adaptable vehicle for meeting regulatory information requirements, for demonstrating the utility's commitment to its community obligations, and for presenting relevant cross- and up-sell offers.

The positive impact, however, goes far beyond just the bills.

Happier Customers, Lower Cost

Every company in every industry wants to provide a satisfying customer experience. But this is particularly important for utilities, given their need to carefully manage costs. Well-informed customers make fewer calls to customer care, and, in addition, when extra services are available, they are more inclined to take advantage of them.

For those customers who need telephone consultation, StreamServe enables the customer service representative to immediately pull up an exact copy of the bill that the customer received. This helps get to the heart of the matter faster, resulting in shorter call duration.

StreamServe Utilities also delivers savings in bill distribution. Accepting a raw data feed from enterprise systems, it produces and outputs bills in whatever format the customer prefers; print, electronic, Web, etc. It also enables customers to self-select their preferred format, so you can efficiently deliver paper bills even while encouraging customers to move to much lower-cost electronic delivery.

Paper bills will be with us for some time yet, and outsourced printing is likely to be, too. StreamServe enables your company to automatically generate the print files in-house, saving cost, but more importantly, giving you back control over your information. Printer-ready files are pre-grouped for the most efficient and cost-effective delivery.

Complementing the Infrastructure with New Power

StreamServe Utilities is a complementary addition that leverages your investment and magnifies the power of your Customer Information System infrastructure by consolidating the design, production, and delivery of billing and other documents into a business-friendly working environment. It reduces the demands on IT resources—both people and systems—by giving business people direct control over the variable aspects of billing documents. This speeds the time to market for business initiatives, and frees IT professionals to concentrate on higher-value work.

The Bottom Line

StreamServe customers regularly report ROI of less than a year and ongoing savings measured in millions. StreamServe can help measurably improve your customer experience while driving costs out of the process and maximizing the value of customer interaction.

StreamServe Utilities™

Customer Satisfaction Up, Costs Down

Billing is often seen as a cost of doing business that offers little opportunity for improvement. But the upgraded billing capabilities provided by StreamServe Utilities drive down the support and operational costs of the billing process, expand the opportunities for enhancing revenue, and substantially improve the customer experience.

These are especially important considerations for utilities, where cost control matters more to profitability than in most other industries, and customer satisfaction plays a significant role in the perceptions of governing bodies.

From the customer's point of view, clearer and more informative bills help them to understand what they've consumed and its cost. These modernized bills can also easily include mandated information, such as sources of power, quality of water, etc., presented in easily understood formats that can be supported by graphics or charts.

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Better Informed Customers Are Better Customers

We are all utility customers, and all of us would prefer never to have to call customer service with questions about our bill. Whether it's for a homeowner or a large commercial company, clear information and relevant additional content on the regular bill can answer many questions that would otherwise trigger a call to customer service.

Minimizing the time needed to understand the bill also has a positive effect on the customer's perception of the utility. For those utilities that offer a portfolio of services, satisfied customers are more likely to expand their business relationship by purchasing additional products and services.

In those cases where a conversation is needed, StreamServe enables the customer service representative to rapidly retrieve an exact copy of the bill that the customer is looking at. This speeds up the consultation process by eliminating non-productive "orientation" time. The utility benefits from more efficient customer service; the customer experience is better because less of their time is wasted.

Billing Offers Excellent Marketing Opportunities

Given that it is the most consistent and regular customer touchpoint, a well-crafted bill also functions as an excellent marketing channel. StreamServe Utilities enables business managers to directly control promotional information included on or with the bill, making it significantly easier to directly deliver personalized up- and cross-sell messages.

Because StreamServe is rules-driven, managers can define parameters that determine which offers and messages to include on a specific customer's bill; for example, offering an energy audit to a customer with an unusually high usage rate. Business people can generate personalizations like this without requiring IT support, so the execution of marketing ideas happens faster, and the demand on IT resources is reduced.

Cost-effective, Personalized Delivery

StreamServe Utilities delivers bills and other documents to customers through the channel they prefer. Each bill can be sent via email, over the Web, via fax, mobile, and, of course, on paper. Customers can specify their preferred channel, and can change that preference whenever they wish.

Despite the growing acceptance of paperless delivery, paper bills are not going away. Neither is the need to distribute them as economically as possible.

Through superior creation, assembly, and distribution techniques, StreamServe Utilities enables higher quality customer communications on fewer pieces of paper, including automatically consolidated bills for multi-site and multi-service customers. Utilities with multiple sister companies can save money by consolidating high-volume printing into one location, while still producing bills with the appropriate logos, colors, addresses, etc.

StreamServe also optimizes postal costs by pre-bundling mailings for the most efficient and cost-effective delivery.

Reinforcing the Brand

Even in communities where there is little direct competition, the brand awareness of the utility is a valuable asset. People like to feel good about the company they work for and do business with, which is the underlying principle of branding. As a consistent and visible point of contact, the bill is a regular opportunity to reinforce your brand. With StreamServe Utilities, bills and other customer documents can reflect all of your brand standards, including logo, taglines, color, graphics, etc.

For those utilities that have several divisions or related companies that have brand variations, StreamServe also ensures that each bill carries the appropriate brand elements.

StreamServe Utilities™

Fast Implementation, Lower IT Demands

StreamServe smoothly integrates with existing or planned IT systems. It leverages investments and magnifies the power of systems such as Customer Information Systems, offloading the creation, production, and delivery of billing and associated documents into a consolidated, business-friendly environment. This relieves IT systems of overhead functions that siphon off resources from more critical service, and frees IT people to concentrate on more satisfying, higher-value work that makes better use of their skills.

StreamServe Utilities incorporates all the data it needs from existing enterprise systems with minimal or no changes to those systems or applications. It is complementary technology that includes a vast array of connectors for receiving information and for outputting bills and other documents in multiple formats. Importantly, it is also enterprise-class technology that is scalable to millions of documents.

Documents are created dynamically within the StreamServe solution based on specific parameters. This is distinctly different from common current practices in which each individual document and each variation of a given document must be separately coded; activity that must be repeated for every enterprise system involved in the information chain. Further, because StreamServe renders bills on the fly, source data can be archived in rapid-retrieval, storage-efficient formats as opposed to storage-intensive PDF images.

StreamServe also reduces the ongoing IT workload by equipping marketing and other business departments to make content and some design changes themselves; whenever they wish and without requiring IT support.

The results are substantially compressed production, significantly reduced demand on IT for production-level work, and greatly reduced development efforts for new documents or changes to documents.

Economizing on Delivery

StreamServe Utilities delivers documents to customers through the channel they prefer. Billing and associated documents can be automatically sent via email, over the Web, via fax, and, of course, on paper.

Through better design and sophisticated consolidation technique, StreamServe Utilities enables enterprises to deliver higher quality customer communications on fewer pieces of paper. For example, StreamServe enabled one customer to consolidate seven pages down to two, resulting in annual savings of over 2.5 million Euros for this communication alone. StreamServe also optimizes postal costs by pre-bundling mailings for the most efficient and cost-effective delivery.

The outcome is that in addition to reducing the workload demands on IT, StreamServe Utilities also equips the IT department to make measurable contributions to the bottom line through reduced costs and more efficient use of budget and resources.

Features at a Glance

Connectivity to all major business applications

• Application independent
• Processes and manipulates both structured and preformatted input data
• Reduces interfaces by using standard input and output connectors
• Consolidates document data from different systems

Document composition and personalization

• Enriches billing and other documents with local language support, bar codes, pictures, graphics and more without additional programming
• Enables intuitive document design and composition with an easy-to-use tool
• Uses one document template for all output formats and output channels
• Easily adds personalized marketing messages

Preparation and post-processing

• Bundles distribution of multiple bills to one recipient
• Migrates to electronic channels and saves distribution costs
• Sorts, consolidates and adds OMR coding prior to printing and enveloping to save postage cost and optimize local tariff usage
• Consolidates multi-site, multi-service information into one bill
• Enables one-location, high-volume printing for group companies while maintaining individual company identity on bill

Multichannel distribution and storage

• Stores all outgoing bills in electronic “final format”
• Supports all conventional archiving systems
• Captures electronic image of bills with identical design, independent of format, to any storage medium
• Maintains same layout and corporate branding on each output channel
• Outputs to print, electronic, Web, telephonic and other electronic channels, as well as to databases and other applications.

Platform support and scalability

• Supports LINUX, AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP
• Enterprise-class scalability to millions of documents

Technology partnerships

• IBM Advanced Business Partner
• Oracle Member Partner
• Certified SAP Software Partner
• SSA Global Solution Partner