On behalf of TEP, a company that delivers safe, reliable power to more than 417,000 customers in the Tucson metropolitan area, Director of Customer Care and Experience Denise Smith will welcome her power industry colleagues to “sunny Tucson”. Ms. Smith will provide her perspective on what is necessary to continue to improve performance and customer satisfaction at a utility contact center in today’s rapidly changing world.

Denise Smith, Director of Customer Care and Experience, Tucson Electric Power Co.

We’re rolling along, training new hires and existing agents, pushing them out to the contact center and basking in the glory of our “smiley face” evaluation sheets but are we really doing justice to our trainees, and optimizing our training ROI? In this session we’ll look at the most common mistakes training groups and contact center operations make, and hear the best practice methods for avoiding these pitfalls. Come hear from an industry veteran about the obstacles to effective training programs, and real methods for overcoming them to the benefit of your organization.

Todd Gladden, CWPP, VP – US Operations, Planmen Consultancy, LLC

Four years ago, IREA’s call center had extensive hold times, employee morale was declining, and customer expectations often went unmet. Today, the call center frequently achieves its service level goal of answering 80% of calls within 90 seconds, employees are enthusiastic, and customers take the time to comment on the excellent service they received. This session will detail how IREA overcame significant challenges to transform both the customer and employee experience. Highlights will include:

• Root cause analysis
• Change management tactics
• Impact analysis
• Future improvements

Mandi Lesher, Consumer Services Manager, Intermountain Rural Electric Association

2:45 – 3:00 p.m. :: Afternoon Break

What does employee focused development entail?  Why is it important to include the words employee and focused?  What benefits can we expect? In this session, learn how PNM resources has been focusing on the development of their employees to improve results in the contact center.

Jorge Esparza, Training & Knowledge Supervisor, Call Center, PNM Resources

Although most utilities collect customer and employee data—surveys, user experience on the website, satisfaction across contact channels, metrics from the call center, and feedback from employees—it’s often fragmented and difficult to quickly access, analyze, report on, or act on. In many cases, utilities have not kept pace with now common practices in other industries to gather, analyze, and act on feedback in real time. As customer expectations continue to rise, it’s more essential than ever to listen, analyze, and act on customer and employee feedback in real time. During this session you will hear best practices related to gathering and analyzing customer and employee insights to optimize your contact center operations.

Maureen Russolo, Vice President, E Source

Identity is at the heart of customer interaction. If you don’t get identity right, everything else will be wrong.  How are organizations able to interact with their customers when consumer data is constantly changing?  This changing data impacts a utility’s ability to efficiently manage both inbound and outbound communications and the struggle between customer experience and cost. Current and accurate customer identity data can help you increase IVR containment, reduce costs for inbound and outbound calls, all while improving the customer experience.

Chris Clark, Director of Fraud, Risk and Compliance, Neustar

Most utility contact centers remain telephony-centric and focused on responding to inbound inquiries. As technology advances and customer expectations heighten, a predominantly inbound engagement model only addresses part of what drives satisfaction, and contact centers need a broader vision to deliver a more complete set of capabilities. Vectren recognized that the path forward for their contact centers was to use proactive communications when interacting with customers. In this session, learn how contact center agents at Vectren use proactive customer service for inbound inquiries such as web chat and twitter.

Cindy Dossett, Performance Assurance Manager, Vectren

Five years ago, EPCOR expanded to Arizona and New Mexico. With 125 years of history and utility expertise behind it, EPCOR is a well-established Canadian company based in Edmonton – establishing a strong foundation and building the company’s customer-focused brand in the United States was crucial. To do this, EPCOR partnered with Vertex Business Services to provide billing services and start up a virtual call center with agents who worked from home in Arizona and New Mexico. This session will describe the successful model and results.

Highlights will include:

• The need – A work-from-home solution
• Solution and evolution
• Lessons learned
• Customer satisfaction
• The results

Jane French, Director – Customer Operations, EPCOR Water

It’s no secret that one of the most difficult aspects of contact center management is finding and keeping the right people for the job. Do you have the right staff (with the right skills) in your call center? Of seven types of reps, one clearly outperforms the rest.  Learn why most companies hire the wrong type for service positions, how you can increase the quality of your call center by (surprisingly) becoming less selective, and discover how to create the right environment to execute an effortless customer experience.

Pete Slease, Principal Advisor, CEB

• Extension/Payment Arrangements
  • Renegotiate existing arrangement when applicable
  • Enhanced rules to allow more eligibility via self-service
• Payments
  • Conversion to pay by phone (storing payment information for future use)
• Account Summary
  • Streamlined
• Hours of Operation
  • Increased self-service
• Payment and Extension Self Service Policy
  • Requires representatives to return eligible customers to self-service to complete transaction
  • Customer adoption over time
  • Customer Authentication
  • Authentication completed by representative then returned to IVR to complete via self-service
  • Increased call reason identification

Ryan Mundy, Quality Assurance Manager, Southern California Edison

Operational efficiency means to look for the obvious and not to reinvent the wheel. Tucson Electric Power (TEP) has analyzed operational cost data and determined that traditional outsourcing is still the solution. In this session, learn how TEP has utilized a very valuable resource (Seasonal Representatives) to lower the Average Speed of Answer (ASA’s) and improve the overall customer experience.

Tashonda Betts, Contact Center Manager, Tucson Electric Power

Every day, customers share streams of information about themselves in their omnichannel interactions. They rarely use just one channel to complete an interaction, and many end up in the contact center. Yet few utilities integrate that information to create a superior customer experience. Even those with “multichannel” operations rarely connect customer data and follow the customer path across channels. Customer experience breakdowns are commonplace as customers move from one channel to the next. The bottom line for today’s world is that customer service teams must be able to leverage all relevant customer data across all channels and at all times. Only then will they be able to provide the kind of seamless, contextual experience customer’s demand.

Dennis Crumb, President, optimalCX solutions, LLC

Chris Bond, Senior Consultant, User Experience, optimalCX solutions, LLC

Quality assurance isn’t an option for contact centers; it’s essential for the success of the contact center, customer and agent satisfaction, improving agent and supervisor productivity and effectiveness, and keeping management in touch with their staff’s performance. Building an effective QA program is an iterative, multi‐step process that requires senior management support, planning and input, and buy‐in from all levels of contact center staff. Managers must ensure that they are evaluating the right components of agent performance during customer interactions and using appropriate measurements and weights.  In this session, attendees will learn about the steps APS has taken to achieve the best results and foster confidence in their quality assurance program.

Renee Cazzell, Quality Performance Instructor III, Arizona Public Service (invited)

Join us for a tour of the Tucson Electric Power (TEP) contact center! Tucson Electric Power’s contact center is home to a team of 68 trained and dedicated customer care representatives (CCRs) that handle incoming calls daily (about 6,000 calls daily) from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. The emergency line is staffed by 16 CCRs that work 24/7, and supervisors are on call around the clock for unexpected needs and off-line work such as email and social media. From the basics — like turning electric service on and off — to more complex questions about customer program offerings, energy efficiency and solar power, our team is always ready and waiting.

NOTE: TEP’s Call Center is located close to the airport. For your convenience, if you plan to depart Tuesday evening, you should plan to leave from the call center instead of returning to the hotel.