What Makes an Exceptional Utility Customer Portal Solution?

May 27, 2021

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Are you looking for a new way to deal with increasing customer expectations, providing your utility customers with a superior service that significantly boosts customer satisfaction levels? A utility customer portal software solution can help you do just that. 

A utility customer portal is a secure customer-facing software platform, designed to promote self-service among utility customers and provide them with access to all of the services and information they need. 

Operating as a dedicated communications hub for utility customers, a utility customer portal gives customers complete visibility into their utility account – allowing them to seamlessly access information and make changes. It also provides utilities and their customers with an easy way to communicate with each other.

With that in mind, what makes a world-class utility customer portal? We’ve listed four of the top features any successful customer portal should feature:

1 – Customer Portal Functionality

A utility customer portal has functionality that benefits not only the customer, but also the utility provider as well. That’s because it creates a two-way dialogue in which customers can access critical functions and information while utilities send information that dramatically improves the utility customer experience – as opposed to a unilateral form of communications where the utility would simply push information to the end user. 

Here are a few of the core functionalities you should look for in a utility customer portal solution:

2 – Improved Customer Engagement

Traditional utility customer communication is typically performed either through your call center or via letters in the mail. But, this simply isn’t how customers want to communicate with their service providers in 2021. They want real-time communication and instant answers.

Through a utility customer portal, you can provide your customers with the personalized, instant and informative communication that they expect from businesses today. Create a proactive communication strategy through notifications and alerts in which your utility helps customers to easily pay their bills, learn about their utility consumption and stay updated with current outages.

3 – Ease of Use

With complete functionality on laptop, desktop, smart devices and mobile applications, a customer portal should be able to provide your customers with an easy-to-use and user-friendly interface that improves their experience with your company. Afterall, one of the major benefits of a customer portal is to reduce customer complaint calls, not increase them.

However, a customer portal should also be easy to use for your utility as well. When choosing a utility customer portal solution, make sure it’s easy to use for those within your company who will be managing it, that it integrates with your current systems (such as CIS, billing, AMI, OMS and online payment service) and that it’s configurable for your utility’s specific requirements. 

4 – Utility Benefits

Implementing a customer portal solution isn’t just about the benefits it brings your customers, it’s also about the ROI that your utility will realize from its use. In fact, successful customer portal solutions have been proven to save utility providers significant amounts of time and money. 

Here are just a few of the benefits that utility providers will realize from the use of a customer portal solution:

  • Enhanced customer self-service, which reduces call volumes to your customer service department and allows agents to focus on higher-value tasks.
  • The automation of manual tasks, making your utility’s processes significantly more efficient.
  • Increased customer service agent retention, since a customer portal will take trivial issues away from your agents and leave them with more rewarding jobs to complete.
  • Money savings from communicating with your utility customers through paperless and  online communications. 

How Can SilverBlaze Help?

The award-winning SilverBlaze Customer Portal for Utilities was designed specifically for utility companies, enabling their customers to seamlessly manage their utility consumption, receive important usage information and notices, change account details, monitor transactions and make online payments, with just a few clicks of a button.

In turn, this delivers significant cost savings and new efficiencies to the utility providers that use the software. 

Want to learn more about the benefits of using customer portal software in your utility and how the award-winning SilverBlaze solution can help your utility realize huge ROI? Contact us today. We would love to answer your questions.

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It’s time to stop worrying about all the issues that come with low customer engagement, and instead, transform your operations to become the leading utility company in your area.

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