Indus International, Inc., a leading Service Delivery Management (SDM) solution provider, announced the rollout of a new Indus SDM solution at Anchorage Water & Wastewater Utility (AWWU), successfully replacing the utility's antiquated mainframe-based system with a highly accessible and flexible web-based application for customer service and billing.
Alaska's largest water and wastewater utility, AWWU installed the new Indus customer information system (CIS) as part of an aggressive initiative to provide world-class customer service to its 55,000 customers. AWWU recognized the urgent need to install newer, more advanced technology that is less expensive to maintain and more flexible in order to adapt to evolving technology and customer expectations. The new Indus solution met these goals by providing a web-based platform that provides customer service account representatives with efficient access to diverse customer information. Through its open architecture, the solution also provides streamlined integration to key third-party systems such as interactive voice recognition and online service options for customers.
"A new era has begun at AWWU," said John J. McAleenan Jr., manager of AWWU's Customer Service Division. "We have always been committed to providing customers with superior service, and today we have the cutting-edge CIS solution to match this commitment. Indus' comprehensive CIS provides highly advanced billing capabilities, and it goes 'beyond the bill' to help us manage all aspects of customer service, providing all the processes and information we need to quickly respond to our customers' needs."
"Progressive utilities like AWWU recognize that yesterday's standalone CIS is not adequate to meet the demands of today's technology-savvy customer," said Indus Executive Vice President of Field Operations John Gregg. "Customers want options in how they interact with their utility, whether online or by voice or with a human being on the phone or in person, and the customer information system needs to support an optimal customer experience regardless of the medium. That's why we designed our solution with not only the most functional depth, but also an advanced architecture to provide flexibility and connectivity across the enterprise."
Indus' industry-leading solution provides a wealth of customer care features, managing all information for new and returning customers and tracking all customer contacts from initiation to resolution. The system goes far beyond a simple CIS.
The Indus SDM solution provided more than just an answer to AWWU's customer management needs. It also proved to be one of the smoothest implementations the utility has experienced, despite upgrading from one version of Indus software to a newer version in the middle of the implementation. The project team composed of customer service and IT experts from AWWU, Indus and implementation partner Resource Data, Inc. (RDI) put the old system to rest and completed data conversion, data entry and daily balancing on the new system in September 2005. According to AWWU's McAleenan, everything worked as planned.
"Statistically, about 35% of all CIS implementation projects fail, so we knew we had a long, arduous road ahead of us," concluded McAleenan. "But, everyone here, in combination with the support we received from Indus and RDI, made this go-live implementation a true success story. Project managers from all three companies agreed it was the smoothest implementation they had seen, especially for a system of this size and complexity."
Source: Indus International, Inc.
