Public Power - May 2008 - (Page 24)

Special Advertising Section FOCUS ON CUSTOMER SERVICE Leverage Your Existing Systems for Personalized Customer Communications BY SCOTT BRAYNARD, VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES, PUBLIC SERVICES EXSTREAM SOFTWARE, A SUBSIDIARY OF HEWLETT PACKARD Utilities today are seeing their budgets stretched to the limit, primarily due to meeting the ever-growing demand for energy and steadily rising costs. Consumers, too, feel the pinch of the increasing cost of energy and all too often “blame the messenger” for the unhappy news they read each month on their utility service bills. And while improved customer communications can go a long way in alleviating some of these concerns, implementing more effective communications presents a new set of challenges—namely, finding a way to address each consumer with relevant messages while staying within budget constraints. Compatibility with legacy systems is a major issue when it comes to creating more sophisticated communications. And this all comes at a time when the personnel who designed and built these older legacy systems are now approaching retirement age. According to the latest survey by Utilipoint International, over half of the industry respondents expect more than 25 percent of their workforce to retire within the next five years. Adding more difficulty, mergers and acquisitions among utilities has often left one organization with several different—and sometimes incompatible—computer infrastructures. Most leading utility companies want to communicate more effectively with their customers, but how can they when their legacy systems, by nature, aren’t able to respond quickly to market demands and when there are so many changes to personnel? The open architecture of ExstreamTM Software’s market-leading Dialogue™ enterprise document automation software easily integrates with existing IT environments. Dialogue also makes it possible to replace multiple corporate systems with a single comprehensive platform for creating all document types, resulting in considerable savings on maintenance and development costs. The right content at the right time The user-friendly software empowers marketing and business users to work independently of IT in order to achieve aggressive time-to-customer goals. Dialogue is designed to meet the varying requirements of different users, with different skills, to help create more attractive, easier-to-understand invoices and other business communications. It’s easy to create dynamic, full-color graphics, charts, and tables that give customers a visual picture of their energy usage and guide their attention to such things as urgent past-due totals or disconnect notices. Turning your monthly statements into monthly “meetings” with consumers allows you the opportunity to update them on rates and usage, suggest less burdensome payment programs, and address other concerns. Cut paper and postal costs Postage and fulfillment are often the single largest expense for business mail. Dialogue helps reduce the amount of paper used and provide significant postage savings by allowing you to incorporate relevant messages into a monthly bill rather than produce separate inserts. Furthermore, Dialogue automatically creates all the fonts and resources needed for the output device so you only have to design your application once for output to multiple delivery channels in a single pass. Additionally, more savings can be realized using Dialogue’s unique high-volume production capabilities, such as sorting and bundling, application consolidation, barcoding, and inserter control. Set the standard Perhaps the best part is that significantly improved, customized invoices and other customer communications can be produced in the same timeframe as conventional business communications, or even more quickly. Rather than investing your utility’s already scarce funds to completely retool your existing infrastructure, Dialogue helps you leverage your current assets with unsurpassed efficiency, functionality, and ease. With one software solution, you can reduce document development and production costs by as much as 80 percent and get mission-critical communications to market up to 85 percent faster. Read about our clients’ experiences—including leading utility companies—and review Dialogue’s capabilities in depth at our website: www.exstream.com. For more information, contact Scott Braynard, vice president of sales, Public Services, Exstream Software, at 859-422-7011. 24 MAY 2008 PUBLIC POWER http://www.exstream.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - May 2008

Public Power - May 2008 Contents Perspective LEEDing the Way Ontario Moves to Mandatory Time-of-Use Pricing Journey to the Smart Grid Right-Sizing Transformers Energy Audits for Large Industries Economic Development Community Broadband Reliability Hometown Connections Parting Shot

Public Power - May 2008

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