City of Charlotte Improves Customer Service Efficiency with Solution from Ventyx

Providing water, sewer and storm water services to a population of more than 750,000 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, the City of Charlotte faced a daunting challenge in serving its growing customer base while streamlining business processes. The City chose to upgrade its CIS with Customer Suite in order to take advantage of enhanced functionality in the areas of usability and improved communication between customer service representatives (CSRs) and service reps in the field.

The Web-based interface provided immediate benefits. "I think clearly the new CSR interface in the Customer Suite has been huge for us," said Chip Harris, business systems division manager with the City of Charlotte. "Because of the ease of use and the ability to see on one screen the answers to a vast majority of questions which customers ask, our CSRs immediately fell in love with it. And, because it minimized the navigation required to reach those answers, that improved the efficiency metrics at the Utilities Call Center."

The ease of use and accessibility of the Web-based solution also helped the city streamline its business processes by improving cross-departmental communication. By integrating the CIS with the Ventyx Service Suite field service management solution, the city has further streamlined cross-departmental workflows. Service orders from the Ventyx CIS are automatically sent to available resources in the field, where service technicians use wireless technology to receive and close service orders in real-time from their trucks. By automating these previously manual processes, Charlotte has improved service efficiency and allowed up-to-the-minute accuracy in service status for customers. By upgrading the CIS solution to the latest release, the city expects even greater benefits.

"We estimated savings from our initial installation in terms of reduced phone calls and eliminating non-value-added activity and redundant work in the field in excess of $260,000," Harris said. "Extrapolating that out for the rest of the short cycle work, we're feeling pretty confident that's going to probably exceed $1 million, once we deploy it across the other service orders. Plus, by improving efficiency in the Utilities Call Center and allowing us to redeploy more resources to customer-facing activities in the field, that will provide some very significant results."

Ventyx president and CEO Greg Dukat added, "Like many municipal utilities, Charlotte Utilities faces a daily challenge of supporting a growing customer base with limited opportunities to expand its revenue. By working with utilities to establish best business practices and delivering comprehensive, integrated software solutions to streamline and automate those processes, Ventyx is helping clients overcome this challenge every day. No other vendor delivers the depth of expertise and functionality which Ventyx offers utilities, and we are committed to maintaining this leadership in the years to come."