One step ahead to prevent customers’ payment risk

Having a technology solution that supports proactive measures to strengthen revenue generation is essential for utilities to overcome challenging situations like customers’ inability to pay bills. To tackle this challenge, utilities must anticipate individual potential risks and deliver personalized offers in a timely, omnichannel manner.

Utilities usually initiate collection management activities only once a customer has failed to pay a bill. By following this conventional strategy, they can guarantee that customers pay part of what they owe. However, this makes it difficult for utilities to maintain steady cash flows, as such activities may convey costs. In fact, recovering the full debt is sometimes impossible to do.

However, wouldn’t it be great to prevent those situations in which customers cannot pay bills on time and avoid reactive collection management altogether? To help utilities overcome these issues, Smartflex has incorporated IBM’s technology to create a perfect-at-the-core, cognitive CIS platform, specially designed to provide utilities with advanced proactive capabilities to segment and assess customers’ payment risk.

The cognitive CIS relies on advanced machine-learning capabilities and data science tools provided by IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data, leveraged by Smartflex’s holistic solution, to create a seamless journey that helps utilities prevent customers’ delinquency. With this system, utilities can deliver a superior omnichannel Customer Experience (CX) by offering customers personalized payment relief plans.

With this solution, utilities can make the most out of the customer data handled in the systems of record (CIS, MDM, and MWM), including account and usage information, billing and payment history, financial standings, associated work orders, and service interactions. By running cutting-edge data models, this information is augmented to create a comprehensive customer profile, enhanced with key financial and usage behavior insights, as well as other forecasting variables that allow predicting payment risk. The prediction is then used to design customized payment relief programs and personalized next-best actions, providing customers with several alternatives to make payments on time while helping utilities optimize cash flow.

Although predicting a customer’s inability to pay is critical, it is also necessary to deliver engaging payment relief programs at the customer’s preferred touchpoint. Luckily, the cognitive CIS platform has been developed to provide utilities with accurate predictive capabilities and top-of-the-line features of systems of engagement to drive customers into action.

The flexibility and agility of this perfect-at-the-core solution enriched with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities give utilities unparalleled proactive tools to anticipate revenue-harming situations, rather than just providing reactive measures that usually are set in motion when it is already too late.

Learn more about how a cognitive CIS can help your company streamline central aspects of your customer-facing operations while bolstering revenue generation.