One of the world’s largest energy companies realizes $26 million in savings from process-driven customer care platform
Graham Technology, a provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today announced that its customer, South African energy giant, Eskom, has won the Gold Award for the Middle East and Africa region at the International BPM Awards and Technology Showcase in Nashville, Tennessee. Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned electricity company is the seventh largest utility in the world in terms of generation capacity, and ninth in terms of sales.
The winning project, codenamed UBUSO (the Zulu word for “face”) created a Customer Service and Relationship Management solution underpinned by Graham Technology’s business process platform, which provided the means to control routing and monitoring of work over Eskom’s vast operational arena and sharing workloads across their seven regional call centres. The platform was also essential in providing campaign management, segmentation and customer profiling capabilities.
“It is an honour to receive an award of this nature at such a well-respected industry event,” said Gabriel Kgabo, Divisional Customer Service Manager, Eskom. “We have focused entirely on our people and processes over the last few years and with Graham Technology’s software platform, we have been able to strip out waste and dramatically improve the customer experience.”
Eskom, with revenues of over US $5 billion, serves more than 3.7million customers throughout South Africa. The vertically integrated utility generates 95% of the electricity used in South Africa and generates over 50% of the total electricity produced in Africa, making Eskom by far the continent’s largest utility company.
The project produced strong results for Eskom:
· Reduced costs: Intuitive system led to lower training costs; Single user interface reduced the cost of people skills as only a single skill set was required; Reduced cost per customer interaction
· Time savings: Reduction in average call handling time; Reduction in dispatched items; Reduction in repeat calls
· Productivity improvements: Increased ability to respond to business change; Increased efficiency through customer self-service; Case handling cuts out inefficiencies; Integration with back end systems provides real time access to information
Taking into account all of the above improvements, Eskom calculates that it will realize accumulated cost savings of more than US $26 million over a five year period.
“Eskom are true visionaries in the application of process-improvement techniques across their operations. Their ambition was instrumental in our product development agenda as they pushed for more and more cost savings and improved customer experience scores,” said David Williams, CTO, Graham Technology. “Our technology takes BPM to the very front line of customer service and support, making it a great fit for Eskom and our many other global clients.”
Now in their 14th year, the Awards were presented on Monday, February 25th, 2008 in conjunction with the BPM Awards and Technology Showcase (http://www.bpmfocus.org/events) held from February 25-26 at the Sheraton Nashville Downtown, in Tennessee. The awards are jointly sponsored by BPM Focus and Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) with support from industry associations Object Management Group (OMG) and media organization, BPM.com.
The BPM Awards and Technology Showcase is a 3-day forum designed by a team of leading independent consultants and industry analysts in the field of BPM. This program was designed for organizations to minimize risk and accelerate decision-making around BPM. Based around an assessment framework and onsite introductions to the leading BPM vendors, it provides an opportunity to fast track your BPM projects and technology assessments.
About Graham Technology
Graham Technology specialises in contact center software and services. Since 1986, Graham Technology has worked with blue-chip organisations striving for operational excellence and who, in partnership with Graham Technology, have realised exceptional return on investment.
Headquartered in the UK, Graham Technology has seven global offices, supporting a worldwide customer base. With its flagship customer interaction software, ciboodle, the company has become recognised as one of the most visionary CRM solution providers in the world. www.grahamtechnology.com
