Businesses everywhere work hard to make the billing and payment process as easy as possible for the customer. Skilled and experienced staff are a must, but they need the right tools to help them help your customers. As customer expectations change, some legacy systems can move quickly from being an inconvenience to a liability.
Aptumo is a next generation billing and CRM solution built specifically for water utilities. When its creators, Echo Managed Services, used their decades of hands-on industry knowledge and experience to build a system bespoke to the water sector they had one goal in mind: to make life easier for you and your customers.
General Manager at Aptumo, Matt Bowd, said, “The water industry is working hard to level the customer service playing field as customer expectations change.
“Unfortunately, many of the legacy systems that are still in use not only fall short when it comes to customer satisfaction, but they actively hamper water utilities as they try to offer the level of service that customers now expect from all suppliers.”
Understanding your customer and how they want to work with you – from meter reads and frequency of billing to payment methods – are the basics for a successful relationship between a water utility and their customer. Aptumo is, first and foremost, a customer-centric solution which makes this kind of relationship much easier to achieve.
“Aptumo builds a 360o real-time profile of each customer. Every engagement can be tracked, which puts everything you know about a customer at your agents’ fingertips for every call. This helps to drive personalised messaging, using the channels that the customer is most comfortable with and always providing the level of detail they need”.
Enabling that level of personal service is just one of Aptumo’s key features. Omni-channel communication options are standard, and in-house configurability makes taking control of the system’s functions and features easy; not to mention much cheaper than relying on vendor support.
“Aptumo isn’t a one-size-fits-all system. It has been built to be flexible, scalable, and futureproof so each water utility can make it their own,” Mr Bowd said.
“Apart from the standard features and out-of-the-box functionality that give Aptumo users that service advantage, it’s also native to the Salesforce platform which gives utilities access to an array of business apps and tools through the Salesforce App Exchange.”
The team behind Aptumo is long established in the UK’s water sector; the system’s predecessor – RapidXtra – is currently being used by nearly a third of all the UK’s water companies. Again, one-size-doesn’t-fit-all so Aptumo has been customised to satisfy needs specific to the Australia market.
“The Aptumo team knows and understands the challenges the water sector faces and wants to help water utilities around the world to improve the standard of service that customers receive. Information statements, for example, are a requirement in the Australia market,” Mr Bowd said.
“This can be a time-consuming job, but Aptumo can automate the request and delivery process, taking it online, which is more in keeping with the experience customers are used to. Consolidated billing can also be a labour intensive, task heavy process, but that can be streamlined as well, freeing up your agents’ time to focus on the service and communication aspects of their role”.
Giving your agents the tools that let them focus on what matters to your customer – direct support and engagement when they really need it – is what sets Aptumo apart from the competition.
“Automated processes alone don’t help customers who are struggling with issues like financial hardship or the impact of family violence; understanding that human touch makes the difference. Put very simply, while Aptumo works in the background monitoring and managing payment plans to help a customer keep control of their finances or protects a customer’s safety and security through flagged accounts, your agents can be front-and-centre building a long term, stable and valuable relationship,” Mr Bowd said.
This is a sponsored editorial brought to you by Aptumo. To find out more, please visit https://www.aptumo.com/AUS or email matthewbowd@echo-ms.com.
