Group 1 Software, Inc., a Pitney Bowes company, has announced that National Grid has implemented its co-sourced e2 Vault and e2 Service solution, part of Group 1 Software’s Customer Communication Management (CCM) portfolio.
Using the e2 solution to serve 3.3 million customers in New York and New England, National Grid centrally stores millions of documents, and gives both customers and call center customer service representatives (CSRs) immediate access to gas and electric service invoices, improving customer service and reducing costs. This high-performance solution archive is hosted in Group 1 Software’s premier data center.
“As a growing utility company, potentially doubling the size of our U.S. business soon, we wanted to reduce call center costs and centrally manage customer information with an integrated archive, print, and electronic CCM solution,” said Jeff Martin, billing director, National Grid US. “We were able to deploy the online solution in just weeks. We immediately started ingesting two to four million documents a month.”
Group 1 Software’s e2 Vault provides real-time indexing, compression, storage and retrieval of documents and data in their native format, delivering instant access to documents, regardless of their age or size. It also gives CSRs and customers instant online access to customer data and documents and stores original, native-print documents to help businesses meet legal requirements.
“Our CSRs also gain fast, immediate access to exact replica documents, providing efficient customer service and fast call resolution,” continued Martin. “Giving CSRs the ability to view the exact bill that the customer is seeing has definitely reduced our call center costs. On top of these product strengths, being hosted in Group 1 Software’s world-class data center further ensures that our data, documents and complete solution are secure, reliable and monitored 24/7 by knowledgeable personnel, reducing our in-house costs.”
The Group 1 Software Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) solution for National Grid now ingests over 10 million pages per month, and, due to the high-speed compression and retrieval speeds, National Grid has seen no performance degradation as the archive has grown.
National Grid realized further savings by enabling customers to view and pay their bills online. To date, over 125,000 customers in New York alone have enrolled for the e-bill option, which reduces print and mail costs.
