Eskom Case Study


Sword Ciboodle Benefits
  • Over £12M savings
  • 80% reduction in average case duration from 30 to 6 days
  • Trebled first contact resolution to 90%
  • 50% reduction in average training time
  • Won the Gold Award for excellence in BPM and Workflow at the Global BPM Awards
The Challenge

Eskom is one of the world's largest utility companies providing more than 95% of South Africa's electricity to 3.9 million customers. However, efficiency and customer service within the front and back office of the distribution division was seriously hampered by inconsistencies in the handling and recording of customer service requests. Customer management systems and processes lacked key integration into customer billing and were heavily reliant on proactive management and manual tracking and follow up. There was insufficient information feedback from the value chains, resulting in multiple customer call backs with no unified case management. In order to retain their position in an increasingly demanding market they had to examine their business processes. The company needed a system that would allow agents to access information more effectively; increasing productivity, enhancing customer service and reducing the overall cost to serve customers.

The Solution

Core processes:

  • CRM
  • agent support tools
  • case based reasoning
  • knowledge management
  • management of service fulfillment
  • campaign management
  • analytical reporting

The project involved creating a CRM solution, underpinned by Sword Ciboodle's business process platform, to control routing and monitoring of work over Eskom's vast operational arena and share workloads across their seven regional call centres. The scalability and integration capabilities of the product were therefore key. The platform was also required to provide campaign management, segmentation and customer profiling.

The Results

This award winning project has reduced the time to service customers, improved the service experience, and realised savings of over £12M over the last 5 years; securing Eskom's place as South Africa's leading utility company. Customer service agents now follow standardised business processes within the system and tasks are executed according to priority. This has improved customer satisfaction, the quality of interactions, reduced time to service customers and enhanced customer service.

The integration of 8 critical systems has allowed Eskom to leverage existing investment, whilst providing agents with an intuitive single desktop, requiring only one skill set, which has contributed to reducing training time by 50%. Information is simplified by a central repository and an electronic contact trail of every customer request is created. Furthermore, the consolidation and integration of the business systems have removed the need for multiple call backs and increased the single contact resolution rate to 90%. Both the organisation and their customers benefit from the 360 degree view of the customer that has been created.
 
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