Many utilities are dealing with the constant stress of billing errors, a problem which affects both customer experience and revenue. Considering the amount of time and resources required to fix the problems caused by these errors, inaccurate billing systems can cause a significant financial burden. Utilities need to face this problem head-on, putting a stop to the frustration and excessive costs caused by billing errors.
The modern utility must maintain a constant focus on flexibility, efficiency, customer experience, and revenue growth To be truly successful in all these areas, it is necessary to have tools which assure the quality of core processes, the most important of which is billing. Not only can these tools help your company improve its finances, but they can also help your employees and customers avoid the unpleasant experience of dealing with billing errors.
Statistics show that 60% of utility bills have errors. You have limited time and resources to dedicate to researching what those errors may be and how to get them back in each state.
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Which billing process is most likely to present errors?
Effective billing strategies typically involve complex interactions between a wide range of billing processes. Some of these processes are more prone to error than others, such as meter reading, usage estimation, uploading rates, charge generation, and the calculation of billing determinants. On top of these concerns, utilities may be opening themselves up to more errors as they explore commercial offers involving new billing models such as time-based rates.
You may be interested in Are you hitting any roadblocks when billing your customers?
Smartflex helps you in the most critical circumstances:
Attempting to move into the next generation of billing without a robust and flexible billing system is a risky move which could result in significant billing errors, causing financial loss and reputational damage. This concern disappears when you have a system which can handle complex commercial offers and rates while guaranteeing billing quality. With Smartflex, you can keep up with the latest industry trends while reducing billing errors and, in this way, minimize the number of unpleasant experiences for employees and customers alike.
More complexity doesn’t need to mean lower quality: Support complex billing for a range of commercial offerings while ensuring your customers enjoy an easy and problem-free experience | |||
| Complex Billing programs | |||
| Budget billing | Demand response programs | Pledges and donations | Co-generation |
Smartflex makes your billing processes more effective because it includes the ability to test and quickly detect outliers and errors. The quality of the bills that reach your customers is assured through intelligent management of billing processes from end-to-end.
- Easily set up innovative rating schemes. Smartflex offers a set of criteria such as geographical location or customer type which can be used to automatically assign the right rates to each customer. Furthermore, the powerful rating engine included in the solution lets you configure user-defined conditions with an interface so intuitive that you don’t need a background in programming to get started.
- Analyze the impact of new rates before activating them by simulating the billing process over a specific range of products. In this way, you can identify mistakes in the configuration of new billing processes and correct them before sending out the bills.
- With Smartflex, planning billing processes is easier; you can schedule them periodically or for a specific date and time. Furthermore, you can keep track of billing processes better thanks to the ability to visualize each scheduled process.
- Quickly identify billing errors and exceptionally high/low bills before invoices are sent to customers. Automatically detect variations generated by changes in service conditions and rate plans using validation rules.
- Perform necessary billing adjustments fast and effectively through the automatic generation of internal orders, ensuring that billing analysists get on the case right away.
- Preview a sample of the total invoices generated during the billing process before sending them out, giving you a chance to catch mistakes and avoid future billing claims.
Dealing with billing quality concerns is demanding; Smartflex can support you in this critical area with comprehensive tools to ensure billing quality from day one of implementation. It’s time to take control of your billing operation with an advanced solution which helps to improve profitability and make life easier for employees and customers alike.
