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With ageing infrastructure in need of continuous maintenance, high levels of customer churn and retention as well as high costs and manual processes in place, there’s plenty of opportunities here for Automation, Robotics and AI to come in and streamline those old processes while cutting costs and increasing customer satisfaction.
Predictive Maintenance can help Reduce Operational Costs
Low levels of predictive maintenance on existing infrastructure often led to higher operational business costs and lower customer retention rates. This is because unplanned downtime is causing service interruption or disruption by having to dig up roads, footpaths or the time taken to find aging assets within industrial complexes. Customers that aren’t getting a reliable service are more likely to switch providers and corporate investors start to get itchy feet when operating profits are low or energy costs are seen as being unsustainable. To increase customer retention, maintenance needs to be carefully measured, monitored, and completed with little or the ultimate goal of no adverse disruption to customers. Birlasoft believes there is a new era in a digitally led asset maintenance approach for energy and utility companies. The future of asset maintenance is prescriptive, leading to intelligent prognostics based digital architectures, which will help companies reduce costs, ensure equipment availability up-time, increase service reliability, and improve safety. Take a look here at some of the great work that they have undertaken.
Customer Churn is on the Rise
Smart businesses are taking note of customer churn and retention, as this winter could be a costly one for customers with their Energy providers. It’s a more pressing issue than ever before as customers grow more selective about where they spend their money. Churn is an issue that most businesses face at some point in time—it can occur for a few different reasons: price, poor customer service, poor product quality/reliability or lack of innovation are all things that can make customers unhappy enough to leave your business for good. There’s no question that turning lost customers into lifelong consumers is vital to your business’ success, so you should take any action possible to retain them. You need those repeat sales from settled customers! The first step toward reducing churn rates is identifying why exactly they occur—in many cases, it can be attributed to one specific problem within your business.
According to Jigar Vakharia, Vice President – Head, Energy Utilities at Birlasoft “The industry needs to harness digital technologies based on the rapid changing customer demands and the need for real-time communication. The industry has many players, so the technologies, challenges and transformations are different for all players in the utility chain.” Read the full opinion piece here.
Process Costs and the New Industrial Curse: Manual Processes
Process costs can be defined as operations that have little or no automation. This leads to higher risks of inaccuracies or accidents because workers lack access to the correct procedures. Manual processes lead to human error which is costly in both time and money. For example, if it takes a B2B utilities sales rep 15 hours of manual labour to process data for 1 customer while an automated process takes only 5 minutes to do what 100 sales reps would take 15 hours each then there’s clearly a need for change. Furthermore, a lot of time is spent onboarding and classroom training new employees on things like how to fix aging equipment or read meters. Combine this with higher employee turnover rates (around 20% per year) that follow along with these manual processes and you have found a truly complex set of challenges to combat. Systems developed by the world’s leading data companies have shown how any business can overcome the process conundrum for example Augmented and Virtual Reality Headsets for reinforced learning guidance whilst on the job for faster problem resolution.
For decisive management decision making you also have Business IntelligenceTM For Utilities from Birlasoft. Birlasoft can help you deploy the technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis and presentation of such business-critical information in a streamlined and truly user-friendly way that can work for teams on the ground, for managers looking for operation excellence and to executives who need to make imperative business decisions on a fast changing energy landscape.
Customer Service and Automated Support
Customer support can be automated much more than other facets of a business. Machine learning technologies are increasingly making it possible to automate complex parts of customer support, such as troubleshooting software issues, finding the right person with the right skills more quickly, being able to reassure customers that action has been taken and tracking results or even analysing power grid usage habits. For example, Birlasoft is harnessing the power of data to overcome these challenges for suppliers worldwide. Read more in the opinion piece here.
The energy industry is facing many challenges as it adapts to new regulations, pressures on profits and customer demands. One trend that is helping energy companies mitigate these risks is automation in Energy Utilities and predictive maintenance systems can monitor a variety of components across a fleet of machines or vehicles to determine when parts will fail. Birlasoft deals with these challenges every single day and knows how to drive value from the solutions which address the above challenges, why not ask them yourself?
Contact and sales details
For more information please reach out to the Birlasoft team.
Website: https://www.birlasoft.com/
Energy: https://www.birlasoft.com/industries/energy-and-resources
Utilities: https://www.birlasoft.com/industries/utilities
Sales Contact Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/birlasoft/
Office: London Office, 4th Floor, 53-54 Grosvenor Street, London – W1K 3HU
Phone: +44 20 7319 5700
Email: [email protected]
Article source: https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/11/08/the-future-is-now-automation-robotics-ai-are-safeguarding-energy-and-utilities-industries/
