Leading Utility Company Enhances Customer Service with …



Overview

Country or Region: United Kingdom

Industry: Utilities

Customer Profile

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) is a Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 company. Its subsidiaries are responsible for the generation, transmission, distribution, and supply of electricity; energy trading; storage and gas supply; electrical, environmental, and utility contracting; domestic appliance retailing, and telecoms.

Business Situation

The company wanted to replicate the online success of its corporate, online e-billing system for domestic customers so that they can view and pay bills online as well as provide online meter readings.

Solution

Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Meridio, SSE upgraded its Web infrastructure using Meridio 4.2 as well as Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 and Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000, both of which are part of Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software.

Benefits

■ Scalable solution capable of handling at least 1.5 terabytes of data per year for a six-year retention requirement

■ Average user response time is less than five seconds

■ Indexes 28 million PDFs annually

■ Increases customer loyalty and retention | | |“To maintain our leading position in the highly competitive energy market, SSE is constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the services we provide.”

John Evans, Senior Technical Architect, SSE

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| | | |Leading utilities supplier Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) has embarked on an innovative |

| | | |e-communications strategy to enhance customer service for its users. Following on from a very |

| | | |successful project to implement a new e-billing system, the company decided to replicate the |

| | | |self-service work for its domestic customers. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Meridio,|

| | | |SSE overhauled its Web infrastructure and implemented Meridio 4.2 in addition to Microsoft Windows |

| | | |ServerTM 2003 and Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000. The new site, |

| | | |, provides online bill viewing and payment |

| | | |options. Customers benefit from an average user response time of less than five seconds and SSE |

| | | |benefits from a scalable solution that is capable of indexing some 28 million documents annually. |

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| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

The utilities market is becoming increasingly competitive as consumers switch from one provider to another to find the best deal. This new market environment places a great deal of pressure on suppliers to not only ensure their services are competitively priced but also to provide the highest levels of customer services possible, and through a variety of mediums.

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), a Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 company, is no stranger to the challenges posed by this new consumer buying power. The group’s subsidiaries are organised into the main businesses of generation, transmission, distribution, and supply of electricity; energy trading; storage and gas supply; electrical, environmental, and utility contracting; domestic appliance retailing, and telecoms.

It may be one of the largest energy groups in the United Kingdom with a combined customer base of more than 6 million, but SSE cannot afford to become complacent when it comes to giving customers what they want.

John Evans, Senior Technical Architect, SSE, says: “All U.K. energy customers can choose who supplies their gas and electricity. With Southern Electric you not only receive low cost electricity and gas but you also benefit from excellent customer service, all from one of the U.K.’s leading and most established energy companies.

“To maintain our leading position in the highly competitive energy market, SSE is constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the services we provide.”

In 2000, the company implemented the Meridio Electronic Bill Presentation Solution to improve services for business customers. Having successfully implemented a new system that helped commercial customers receive and view bills electronically, SSE decided to replicate the project for its domestic customers. This aim is part of a wider online, self-service transformation goal that will facilitate not just the online viewing of bills, but also online meter reading, and online bill payment.

Solution

Meridio develops industry-leading electronic document and records management (EDRM) software exclusively for Microsoft® environments. Its solutions are designed to transparently integrate with the Microsoft Office System products, helping businesses like SSE to implement state-of-the-art EDRM with minimal additional infrastructure costs and training. Meridio is an enterprise-capable platform, providing strong integration with advanced features of Microsoft .NET connection software and employing enhanced Web Services. Meridio’s web client uses Microsoft , resulting in a very simple but powerful user interface.

However, in this case, it wasn’t simply a case of extending the solution’s use. SSE recognised that it would need to radically rethink its Web infrastructure to successfully provide this new self-service functionality for customers. Previously, its Web site was hosted by Attenda. While this model historically worked well, SSE was looking for a more cost-effective option in the longer term, and the additional bandwidth costs associated with the new provision would have proved too high.

Given its previous experience of using Meridio technology, SSE was already in the advanced planning stages of the project when it asked for further Meridio involvement. The company benefited from two days of Meridio consultancy, which involved a review of its plans and the provision of additional design and scope support.

Evans says: “There are some similarities between the commercial and domestic billing and self-service projects. But there are more differences. This project is much more ambitious. We wanted to make billing information available to customers who visit us online as well as our own customer services people.”

The new e-billing system, which is accessed through (Figures 1 and 2) is powered by HP hardware and Microsoft software. When users visit the home page they have the option of accessing a dedicated e-billing section, where they can then register as a new user or log on as a previous subscriber to the self-service element.

(Figure 1) (Figure 2)

The old site ran on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system, Microsoft SQL Server™ version 7.0, and Internet Information Services (IIS) version 5.0. As part of the site transformation, these technologies have been upgraded. The new site architecture is set up to deal with 50,000 concurrent users so it can meet demand without adversely affecting performance. It comprises:

•The Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (Service Pack 3a), both part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.

•Windows Server 2003 is configured for clustering and load balancing in this instance.

•Meridio 4.2.

•Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 with Service Pack 3.

•IIS version 6.0.

The Meridio Web architecture is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and supports open standards such as XML, HTML, and Web services. Web services feed data from SQL Server to the two Meridio servers, which are capable of indexing some 28 million PDF files each year. Management is simplified through the use of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), which is also part of Windows Server

System, and SiteScope, both of which provide 24/7 monitoring and alerts.

To recognise newly signed-up customers before they have received a bill, a stream of customer account numbers, brands, and postcodes is fed into the SQL Server database using Data Transformation Services (DTS).

Benefits

A New Way of Serving Customers’ Needs

The new site went live in December 2004. Since then, SSE has loaded more than 7 million bills. This new self-service capability offers a massive boost to the company as it provides customers with more choice in how they interact with their utilities supplier. In a competitive and consumer-fickle industry, this is a potentially huge advantage.

Evans says: “The Internet Bill Presentment System is proving extremely valuable to our customers. It is also a major differentiator for SSE, which will help us to stay ahead of the competition.”

SSE’s commitment to superior service delivery and enhanced customer communication has not been in vain. Since 2002, the company has gained an additional 1.5 million customers, boosting its customer base to more than 6 million.

Getting the Most out of Existing Investments

Like most organisations today, SSE is under pressure to do more with less and reduce costs without compromising on performance wherever possible. The new Web infrastructure, based on Microsoft and Meridio technology, helps the company to do just this.

SSE has also used Meridio for a number of other strategic projects, including those resulting from the £3 billion (U.S.$5.4 billion) acquisition of Transco in early 2005.

"As architect for document collaboration during our Transco Gas Network procurement phase, I had to devise a solution that would help partners in Germany and Canada to share project documentation and information during the key steps in the negotiations. Access to this information had to be both secure and run internationally over the Internet. SSE has used Meridio products for more than five years now, ranging from Mainframe archiving to e-billing and document management.

“The Web client version 4 provides an ideal, practically ‘out of-the-box’ solution and helped us to deliver a Web site using RSA SecurID and SSL technologies. Access to particularly sensitive documents can be very granularly restricted on a user-level to relevant parties, but also helps us to keep all the project documentation in the same secure repository for viewing even without the creating applications. This solution has turned out to be a great success for SSE."

Securing Customer Loyalty

Any company that has a requirement to handle sensitive customer data has a duty to keep that information confidential and secure in compliance with the Data Protection Act. SSE places IT security very high on the agenda, and this criteria was key when selecting a solution. The high standards of security delivered by the new infrastructure brings the company closer to its aim of achieving the BS799 security standard. The Active Directory® directory service is used for user account validation.

Evans says: “It would be detrimental if customers could see other customers’ bills or payment information. This would damage customer relations, result in loss of business and adverse publicity, and be detrimental to our brand. To provide our customers with the confidence they need, we have implemented a robust application to ensure that no vulnerabilities exist that can be exploited to reveal the data of other customers. Strong authentication controls are in place to restrict customer access to their own data. Likewise, the system does not hold full card details once the transaction has been authorised by the payment gateway service provider.”

As well as ensuring immediate information security, SSE must also keep historical data secure. SSE’s audit procedures require that all 28 million bills created per annum are stored for a period of six years and are retrievable electronically by call centre staff. A new storage area network (HP EVA 5000), installed as part of the self-service project, gives the company the confidence it needs that it will be able to store and retrieve growing volumes of data easily.

The entire solution can store more than 1.5 terabytes of data per year. “Should we acquire a significant new customer base or increase the retention requirement for data, the storage sub-system has the capability to expand without impacting site functionality or modifying the overall architecture,” says Evans.

High Performance and Availability

The new Web infrastructure is secure and robust. It also delivers high levels of performance and availability. The Meridio servers can handle the transactions generated by 400,000 registered customers and associated monthly traffic patterns. Requested content is also delivered very quickly, with an average response time of less than five seconds.

Bills in PDF format are loaded into the system within 12 hours of being created and the Meridio system can handle more than 150,000 documents loads each day.

“All Web sites under the SSE brand need to have the highest possible up-time. It is simply unacceptable for the sites to be completely unavailable for extended periods of time as they are a public corporate image and reflection of SSE. To ensure this is never a problem, our Web farm servers are designed to cope with internal hardware failure, entire system failure, or even complete site failure,” says Evans.

A New, Paperless Environment for the Future

SSE is the United Kingdom’s largest generator of renewable energy. Its move to paperless billing and e-communication is another example of its commitment to improving the environmental performance of all its activities. In 2004, the company was recognised for the second year running as Best in Sector in the 8th Business in the Environment Index of Corporate Environmental Engagement—making it both the best performing electricity company and best performing utility.

In the year leading up to March 31, 2004, SSE reduced its own paper consumption by almost 40 per cent. Evans says: “By electing to use e-communications to interact with our customers and shareholders, we hope to reduce paper consumption and the global warming gases associated with print production and postal delivery. In return, we will plant native species trees in the Scottish and Southern Energy Woodland, which will also help to absorb CO2 and other gases associated with global warming.”

The company now plans to continue to build on the success of its e-communication initiative and further strengthen its relationship with Meridio.

Evans says: “The work we have done so far lays the foundation for future online initiatives that are strictly under our support and control. Our new Web infrastructure is closer to our back-end systems, meaning we can drive new value for customers and internal users more quickly and more successfully as we move forward.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management. For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

‌windowsserversystem

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| |Software and Services

Products

Microsoft Operations Manager 2000

Microsoft SQL Server 2000

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition

Microsoft Commerce Server 2000

Technologies |Microsoft Active Directory

Hardware

■ IIS 6.0

■ Meridio 4.2 | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published July 2005 | | |

For More Information

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½For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:



For more information about Meridio products and services, visit the Web site at:



For more information about Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) products and services, visit the Web site at:

scottish-southern.co.uk

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