Oracle Enables Utilities to Embrace a Customer-Centric Future

The utility industry is undergoing a massive evolution as utility customers are becoming more active consumers and producers. The explosion of data from a multitude of devices, including meters, IoT sensors, and smart home appliances, require utilities to rethink old business and billing models to meet the demands of this new utility economy.

As such, Oracle continues to enhance its leading customer solutions platform to deliver the tools water, gas, and energy utilities need to address this changing market dynamic. With a modern user interface, deep analytics, and built-in integrations with operational device data management and customer self-service capabilities, utilities can better engage customers at scale. For example, they will be able to tap user interface innovations to target customers for new programs based on personalized information on their utility usage. The new features are now available across Oracle’s customer solutions, including Customer to Meter and Customer Cloud Service (CCS).

“In this new utility economy, the customer is transitioning from a billable account to a participant in the utility business model. With changes in rates, regulations, and production, customers are looking for more information regarding their usage and bill and how they can lessen the impact of both,” said Hillary Martin, senior director, Oracle Utilities. “Antiquated customer systems simply don’t allow utilities the flexibility and intelligence they need in this changing market paradigm. With our continued updates, Oracle is bringing utilities to the leading edge of innovation.”

Driving Customer Innovation at Scale

Customer Cloud Service brings together Oracle Utilities’ market-leading customer information system (CIS) and advanced meter data management capabilities into a single meter-to-cash-to-customer solution on a shared database and technology stack. By bringing metering, customer account and revenue data into a common view, enriched by deep analytics and data visualization tools, utilities can drive greater business value from the increasing amounts of data and convert it into actionable business insights.

Built on the Oracle Cloud and delivered as the industry’s first fully supported Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, CCS features automated patching, upgrades, security, and standard SaaS services—freeing up valuable utility resources. With CCS, utilities gain a complete view of their customers and significant cost reductions compared to managing two separate systems. 

With these new innovations, CCS and Customer to Meter utility customers can benefit from:

• User Experience Enhancements: Guided by dozens of years working closely with customers on their CIS initiatives, a decade of Opower behavioral science research and design best practices, Oracle customer solutions feature a new, clean and modern interface and improvements to the ways end users interact with data, insights, content and context. With guided workflows and intuitive design, even brand new customer service representatives can deliver the same level of service as long-term call center experts.
• Advanced Analytics: With the exponential growth in volumes and sources of data, utilities have an ever-expanding opportunity to derive value from that information to support better decisions across the business. With pre-built analytics embedded in both Oracle Utilities customer solutions, users can drive insight throughout the customer lifecycle. This allows utilities to visualize data clearly across systems and slice and dice to discover fresh insights that support customer engagement, revenue management, and more. With Oracle, utilities have the power of data science and machine learning at their fingertips, in pre-packaged solutions designed specifically for utility needs.
• Operational Device Management: enables utilities to track meter and device inventory and monitor performance from within the same system capturing meter reads and customer accounts. This customer-device-data integration in a single solution not only reduces technology costs for utilities but also provides a more complete, “single source of truth” picture across an increasingly distributed network. This helps utilities move beyond the meter to leverage data across all relevant devices so they can explore and scale to new connected home services and more.
• Digital Self Service: delivers a crucial component in providing modern customer experiences. By integrating Oracle Utilities Digital Self Service (DSS) and Oracle customer solutions, utilities can deliver superior service across channels and devices while driving down operating costs. In addition, based on a decade of user insights and design experience from Opower, Oracle DSS provides a strong web foundation to launch additional customer engagement programs. 

“Utility distribution is no longer a linear equation where a customer uses a resource and then is billed for it. With the industry’s most connected, end-to-end customer platforms, Oracle is enabling utilities to become trusted advisors in this new journey while modernizing operations for an evolving customer-centric utility future,” added Martin.