SmartestEnergy partners with EXL, supports working capital improvements through significant on-time revenue and billing automation enhancements
Introduction
SmartestEnergy, a next-generation energy company in the UK, is a leading purchaser of independently generated renewable electricity and a licensed energy supplier. The company has been rapidly expanding every year and needed to optimize their billing processes to keep up with their growth. In particular, the company was focused on making data-driven improvements to metrics for revenue billed on time and achieving auto-billing rates that met and exceeded industry standards. An EXL team with deep utility industry, analytics, and digital expertise provided consulting services and worked with the company’s in-house analytics team to find and fix billing system issues and improve billing automation.
Challenge
SmartestEnergy is an electric energy provider with a diverse UK customer base including commercial, manufacturing, and multi-tenant. The company has been growing at 30% each year and needed their billing operations to keep up with this high customer portfolio growth. Specifically, SmartestEnergy needed to move beyond manual, time- and labor-intensive billing practices and automate as much of their operations as possible. An additional focus was on reducing failure demand to prevent problems before they arose.
Solution
EXL installed an expert team with utility industry expertise at SmartestEnergy. The team conducted an initial analysis of the company’s billing operation with the goal to improve bill on time. This required performing an in-depth analysis of the client’s data to identify opportunities, as well as collaborating across customer service responsible for sending out bills, invoice inputs, upstream process issues such as price and system exceptions, IT support, onboarding, and billing and metering teams. From their baseline data testing and root cause analysis, the EXL team quickly determined the top 20% of issues that resulted in 80% of impact.
Various system bugs
that were affecting auto-billing were identified and fixed.
Non-value-added billing exceptions
were located. A collection of NVA exceptions was presented to SmartestEnergy. Those that were not serving any purpose were eliminated.
Billing group issues
were determined and addressed. The EXL team established a group of new system flags specific to billing types to be used during the customer acquisition process.
Other failure demands
were reviewed and addressed to reduce the number of exceptions. These were activities such as billing exceptions, metering exceptions, or other system tolerances. The EXL team conducted a data study regarding high and low value tolerances and corrected existing logic to flag only genuine fallouts.
Proactive billing workflows
were examined and revised. Once post-bill issues were resolved, the EXL team looked at pre-bill concerns. EXL created a new workflow that combined the different types of automation fallouts into a single view. The new workflow applied learnings from the customer journey and has allowed the SmartestEnergy team to maintain and improve consistency in their billing performance.
Results
Working together with the SmartestEnergy team, EXL delivered significant cost savings and auto-billing operational improvement. Plus, EXL was able to manage and maintain this performance, even while the company experienced a 30% customer growth rate.
Key EXL outcomes:
- Auto billing improved by 30%
- Failure demand reduced by 50%
- Work capacity created was equivalent to four full-time employees
- Revenue billed on time increased to 96%
EXL continues to work with SmartestEnergy, starting with two additional projects. The EXL team is creating a hyperautomation center of excellence to simplify and automate processes across the customer journey. EXL also is offering focused analytics and predictive algorithms to proactively manage issues leading to lower failure demand.
About EXL
EXL has served the utilities industry for more than 20 years, devising practical solutions that make sense of data to make human efforts more valuable, meaningful, and rewarding. Our global team can partner with your utility company to build more customer-centric and compliant operations, develop deeper insights through analytics, and lower costs using AI-powered digital solutions.
To learn more about EXL, go to https://www.exlservice.com/industries/utilities