The average Australian’s experience of utilities, in recent years, has been marred by rising bills, fraught with politics, and slow digitisation; it’s left the retail energy and water offer seemingly out of step with rapidly rising consumer expectations on service and experience.
Entering the market at a pivotal time for Australia’s utility retailers, UK tech trailblazer Echo Managed Services has announced the Australian launch of Aptumo – an innovative, cloud-based, utility customer billing solution ready to shake up the energy and water industries. Aptumo provides the tech platform for utilities to re-establish positive relationships with their customers, dramatically improving the experience of billing, with services that can be personalised to consumer needs.
Managing Director of Echo Managed Services, Nigel Baker, said the Aptumo software as a service (SaaS) solution will underpin the requirement for better billing and customer engagement for any utility ready to face the challenge.
“Aptumo delivers an easy-to-use and intuitive interface that is cloud-based, easily scalable, and quick to deploy. It increases the efficiency and effectiveness of utility customer services teams, as well as delivering stand out security and scalability, Mr Baker said.
Already at the forefront of the UK utility retail market, Echo has developed in Aptumo a highly configurable, regulatory compliant and future-proofed billing solution that is architected to enable clients to bill anything anywhere, bringing clients closer to their customers.
Aptumo can be deployed as a standalone customer billing platform or easily integrated with the client’s choice of CRM package.
Built on the Salesforce platform, utility companies can reduce their integration and data synchronisation headaches via a single data model across their customer service operations by choosing Aptumo together with Salesforce, the global leader in CRM. This also enables Aptumo to be easily extended, with an ecosystem of apps through AppExchange, empowering businesses to connect with their customers, partners and employees in entirely new ways.
“We understand that choosing a billing system is a fundamental decision for our clients, and one that requires a long-term commitment. However, it’s never been more important to future-proof systems to remain competitive and innovative. Aptumo provides just that – designed to be dynamic, its ability to easily change and grow means it will fit the needs of utility companies, now and in the future,” Mr Baker said.
“Our team has a proven legacy of building billing solutions for the UK market, having developed RapidXtra – used by over one third of UK water companies – and being partnered with 35 water and energy companies. We have been at the heart of the highly-regulated UK utilities sector for over 20 years, meaning we have an in-depth understanding of our clients’ and their customers’ needs.
“We have leveraged this experience and expertise, building Aptumo in a way that helps to bring utility clients closer to their customers – creating better connections and better conversations; a vital consideration as companies and their regulators look to place customers at the heart of services. Already chosen as the solution of choice for a forward thinking water company in Victoria, Aptumo opens up the art of what’s possible and we can’t wait to start helping even more Australian utility companies reach new heights with our innovative software.”
