Faced with outmoded technologies, mounting operational costs, and the imperative to align with Fair Use Policies, a major Midwest utility organization—provider of vital city services like water, health, and sewer—needed a comprehensive overhaul of its aging contact center platform. Antiquated on-premises legacy systems were increasingly burdensome to manage and lacked the scalability required for a city in expansion mode.

With three separate billing systems lumped into a dated administrative system for each service, the organization needed to consolidate under a single, modernized, multi-tenant platform to streamline operational costs. Reporting and analytics upgrades were also needed to analyze and improve upon the utility’s containment rates. And conversational artificial intelligence (AI) was identified as a key exploration target to enhance the user experience. Lastly, the organization needed to integrate an effective workforce-management component to effectively manage their growing contact center.

All of these issues (and more) spurred the utility to modernize its contact center platform by implementing innovative cloud technology that could enable them to unlock a new era of high-level efficiency, mobility, and productivity.

The organization selected Waterfield Tech to spearhead its modernization efforts. Waterfield’s utilities-sector experience supporting multiple water, gas, electric, and waste clients—and expertise in on-premises cloud migrations—made the choice simple.

A comprehensive, innovative, efficient solution, with seamless workflow integration

Waterfield Tech migrated the utility’s on-premises contact center to a Genesys Cloud solution, providing feature-rich capabilities and applications that enabled the organization to manage its ever-increasing volume of customer email communication via seamless multi-channel integration within the standard agent workflow. Key modernization tactics included:

• Expanding account-information lookup access for the utility’s customers through Oracle and interactive voice response (IVR) integration
• Mapping, designing, and implementing an English- and Spanish-language IVR component that enables customers to use an AI-powered gateway for answers to their questions instead of waiting to be routed to an agent.
• Empowering increased agent productivity by implementing a fully integrated dialer solution for courtesy follow-up calls, reminders, and callbacks.
• Configuring and implementing workforce- and quality-management solutions to analyze and manage their budding contact center.
• Planning, developing, installing, and testing the full suite of deployed solutions.
• Training their workforce to harness the system’s full range of features and functionality.
• Installing a customized, proactive monitoring and alert (Pulse) notification application that alerts both the utility and the Waterfield Tech support team when system disc space and server performance are interrupted or not functioning properly.

The new omnichannel platform simplified monitoring/scoring processes with a single desktop (instead of three), and it unified customer engagements across the full range of voice and digital channels (email, web chat, social messaging). Genesys Cloud also provided advanced engagement features like co-browsing, screen share, and file sharing. By eliminating the need to context-switch, the omnichannel desktop brought much-needed efficiencies and personalization to the organization’s workforce.

Robust multi-tenant capabilities and account-payment options enabled our client to more easily manage multi-departmental billing and comply with PCI SSC requirements

By partnering with Waterfield Tech, the utility was able to make the transition from obsolete manual monitoring and scoring processes to a modernized platform with advanced features for workforce, quality management, forecasting, and scheduling. Disjointed, limited reporting gave way to advanced reporting analytics, drill-down reports, and upgraded dashboards that delivered deeper insights into their operation.

The client is now implementing a short message service (SMS) channel that enables customers to download a QR code directly from ads to report pipe bursts in and around the city. And its partnership with Waterfield Tech continues to grow, with ongoing training, forward-planning strategy meetings, and timely, as-needed, system updates.

Recognizing the benefits our client accrued from the Genesys Cloud platform, the city’s health department and metropolitan sewer district are deploying this solution within their departments to leverage the power of Genesys Cloud for their own operations. And the city’s income tax division as well as the city’s police department have expressed interest in piggybacking onto the new multi-tenant platform in the year ahead.

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