Accenture and SAP Accelerate Extension of Multichannel Customer Engagement Platform for Utilities
At the European Utilities Week event in November 2016, Accenture and SAP announced the joint plans for a digital customer engagement platform to help utilities to engage with customers through virtually any channel, improving customer operations efficiency and user experience. In addition, this platform enables utilities expanding their business in new areas and allows selling of third party products.
This announcement comes after both companies announced in October our collaboration to develop the next generation of predictive analytics solutions for asset management in the utilities industry to enable condition-based maintenance.
Increased Efficiency and New Revenue Streams through Customer Engagement Platform
Alongside simplified customer service and operations, the customer engagement platform helps to enable utilities to offer customers non-commodity products and services, such as solar panels, batteries and connected home products, including related installation and maintenance services. Customer engagement platform will also allow utilities to sell third party products easily to their clients.
The new platform combines the S/4HANA Utilities solution with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer and SAP Multichannel Foundation at its core to enable more agile and easier to use sales and service processes and efficient meter to cash management. Additional elements such as SAP Hybris Marketing, SAP Hybris Commerce and SAP Hybris Billing solutions are integrated to create a 360-degree view of the customer as well as the management, selling and billing of energy and non-energy products and services. Customer self-service interactions will be enabled through a portal, mobile apps and social media.
The customer engagement and billing platform by Accenture and SAP provides the following key capabilities:
- Multi-channel & eCommerce enablement
- Improved user experience
- Simplified processes
- Real-time operational reporting
- Predictive analytics
- Customer 360° view
- Commodity & non-commodity products and services
- Integration of 3rd party products and sales enablement
- Standard API based platform
- Agile extension concept
The customer engagement platform is scalable for future growth as it targets cost reduction through cloud-deployment, lower and more predictable operational costs from an as-a-Service option and more automated processes with embedded analytics.
Visit us at the International SAP for Utilities Conference in Lisbon and join our session on March 30th, to:
- Learn about the next generation SAP Digital Customer Engagement and Billing Platform that allows the Utilities to seamlessly engage with their customers virtually through any channel
- Get a preview of the current features, benefits and the planned roadmap
- Understand how utilities can transform from the existing system landscape to the Digital Customer Engagement Platform, supported by SAP and Accenture
- Meet the responsible product experts from SAP and Accenture