A British utility had a customer service problem: Customers who questioned their bills had to navigate a tedious process to handle the complaint. They had to contact the company to schedule an appointment for a worker to visit their home to re-read the meter, a reading that was then fed into the corporate system that would later generate a new invoice.
Start to finish, the process took about a month — and, not surprisingly, created a number of unhappy customers.
Utility executives saw an opportunity to do better.
So Ashok Pai, global head of cognitive business operations at Tata Consultancy Services, worked with the utility’s CIO to explore not just where technology could aid the utility in fielding the customers’ complaints but whether it could actually transform how the company handled these requests from start to finish.
The solution: An app that customers can download to snap photos of their meters, images that optical character recognition (OCR) software then reads and processes to generate new bills. The app even gives customers the option to pay their newly generated bills immediately.
read more at https://www.cio.com by Mary K. Pratt
Cio
