Utility Increases Customer Satisfaction, Reduces Costs, Gets Users
Involved, with New Client/Server System

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., October 10 . . . With more than two million customers
relying on it for electricity, General Public Utilities (GPU) knew it
needed to improve customer satisfaction. The way to do that? By increasing
the productivity of its customer service representatives.

Rather than being able to concentrate on customers' needs, representatives
were distracted by cumbersome processes and unfriendly computer system
demands -- to enter transaction codes, manually follow process paths,
codify input data, duplicate data on system orders and customer
correspondence, and to remember data standardization rules not verified
online.

Using an IBM OS/2 operating system as an application development platform,
GPU systems architects, with the assistance of customer service
representatives, designed and implemented a comprehensive client/server
environment using technologies that integrate mainframe legacy
applications with the newly developed graphical user interface processes.

Utility commissions mandate customer-oriented processes such as answering
questions, providing various notification letters, confirming work
schedules and visiting customer locations. GPU is a holding company with
several electric utilities and at one alone, based in Pennsylvania,
customer service representatives were faced with 100,000 service
discontinuance calls a year -- at an average of eight minutes per call.

During each call, representatives would have to sift through a blizzard of
paper and access a large number of computer screens on their workstations
to answer the call. Often, a customer's simple request to discontinue
service resulted in confusion, frustration, errors and complaints.

To improve customer service and increase productivity, George Repko, vice
president of customer service and operations at Met Ed/Penelec, a GPU
utility, requested the development of a new process that creatively
employed information in technology.

There were several prerequisites: have users help with development to
reduce the training time for operating the new system and develop a more
user-friendly interface. "We wanted to find a new way to do business,"
explains Dariene Horten, Met Ed/Penelec customer services manager and
project coordinator. "Right from the beginning, we were thinking about
what we needed to improve efficiency, not to simply build a different
version of what we had in the past. That was the real challenge."

Several local area networks feed into a wide area network spanning a
two-state area. Over 7,000 individual workstations access a vast
storehouse of information via mission-critical applications. The
successful implementation of the complex client/server computing
environment was accomplished with a versatile set of IBM products -- LAN
Server, Communications Manager/2 and LAN Requestor.

Each process is a rules-based operation where the system determines the
course of action to be taken by the service representative based on
responses received. Other pertinent information is used in the equation to
prompt the customer service representative to gather data in support of
the action being taken. In addition, all help and procedure references are
accessed easily online.

When Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PA PUC) representatives saw
the system, they applauded the work. "The ideas that GPU incorporated into
their system are innovative and clearly simplify the work that employees
are required to do when a consumer contacts the company," says Wayne
Williams, Ph.D., chief, Division of Research and Policy, PA PUC.

With an aggressive set of projects to improve customer service, GPU has
embarked on a phased approach to rewriting, with significant enhancements,
the company's four critical business applications -- the customer services
information system, the work management information system, system
restoration analysis and the facilities management information system --
using leading-edge client/server technology.

Results to date are impressive. In addition to increased responsiveness,
there have been fewer complaints to the Public Utilities Commission, and
significant service center cost reductions. Customer contact time has been
cut in half, and a 40% performance improvement has already been realized
in the discontinuance credit process.

And from here? "Who knows," says Met Ed/Penelec's Horten. "It seems there's
nothing you can't do with this technology. At GPU the acronym 'OO-GUI' no
longer stands for 'Objected Oriented -- Graphical User Interface,' but
'Our Objective -- Get Users Involved.'"
 
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