The Challenge
Cost-effective and Efficient Customer Care
Serving more than 5 million customers, our client supplies electricity and natural gas for residential and business customers across the US. They are recognized for being a leading source of clean energy solutions.
Their ongoing success led to a large volume of work. However, their legacy infrastructure was ill-equipped to manage the increasing demands of customer care while maintaining cost-effectiveness and operational efficiency.
Our client needed a strategic partner capable of enhancing and automating their customer engagement processes. They turned to Sutherland to help them implement a cost-efficient, scalable solution to enhance responsiveness and improve handling and resolution times for a better overall customer experience.
The Outcome
A Holistic Approach to Customer Care Transformation
Starting with a deep understanding of our client’s engagement process with their customers, Sutherland proposed a comprehensive solution that integrated people, processes, and platforms.
We began by introducing a new global operating model for customer support. Front-office operations were established in the US with bilingual agents that could speak English and Spanish, paired with a comprehensive training curriculum and Sutherland’s AI-powered Cognitive Knowledge Engine. This enabled customer care agents to quickly and easily solve customer queries, ensuring our client could deliver consistent, quality enhance customer support while significantly reducing average handle time.
Existing processes were then redesigned for efficiency, bringing automation to operations. Advanced analytics were also introduced across the business, providing actionable insights to further streamline processes and drive cost savings.
With the new operating model in place our client saw:
- Stabilized Average Speed of Answer (ASA) levels
- 15% improvement in call handling time since inception
- Service order reduction from 25%+ errors to under 5%
- 30% improvement on Quality Assurance (QA)
“Partnering with one of the top suppliers of clean electricity and natural gas for residential and business customers across the US was an opportunity for Sutherland to showcase our domain expertise and market-leading technology to achieve tangible results. Through the holistic transformation of operating models and processes, we integrated people, processes, and platforms to enable cost-efficient customer care that exceeded expectations“
– Noah Beltran
SVP, Transformation and Innovation
Services
CKE – Cognitive Knowledge Engine
Industry
Energy and Utilities
Improvement in call handling time since inception
Service order errors (reduction from 25%+)
Improvement on Quality Assurance (QA)
