Stream Energy to Implement Genesys Solutions

Stream Energy, a major electricity retailer in Texas' deregulated utilities market, adopted a three-year plan developed by Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories to upgrade its call center and customer-facing activities.

The Transformational Roadmap developed by Genesys Business Consulting details a technology and management approach to keeps Stream a step ahead of business expansion to ensure consistent customer service. It includes a wide range of technologies, such as workforce management tools to improve agent utilization, agent scripting to improve service, skill-based routing to deliver callers to the best resource, and business process routing to link the Stream contact center with other departments. The roadmap also calls for integration of multichannel interactions (voice, e-mail, chat and Web), offers Stream customers speech-enabled self-service, and provides Stream agents with information captured during self-service interactions to better help callers who opt to switch to assisted-service.

Stream will also implement an automated customer satisfaction survey that will help shape contact center policies regarding self-service, hold times, agent help, e-mail usage, Web contacts and other issues.

Stream will begin to implement the roadmap in the summer when it installs Genesys Voice Platform, Virtual Hold for Genesys, and speech-enabled self-service and assisted service. The Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) Platform will form the basis of all the applications that Stream adds as it goes forward. The modular, dynamic nature of the CIM Platform allows Stream investments in additional Genesys software to integrate with existing infrastructure and increase value by adding new features.

"In the past, utilities didn't really need to be concerned with having excellent customer service because they had a captive audience," said Greg Martin, manager special projects, Stream. "Deregulated markets, on the other hand, allow us to compete for customers with a strong emphasis on customer service at the core. This is a paradigm shift in the way that Stream will do business. Customer service used to be something that only existed in the contact center. Now, all units will eventually be linked so that Stream can leverage its full capabilities to optimize the customer experience."