Industry Vertical: Energy & Utilities

Information today is among the most valuable business tools for all types of organizations, especially for energy and utilities organizations which hold and produce vast amounts of information in geographically dispersed locations.

Autonomy's Pan-Enterprise Search infrastructure which can cross company divisions, geographic locations, products, applications, operating systems and languages has helped global Energy and Utilities organizations ensure staff are provided with the correct piece of information they are looking for, thus enhancing productivity and collaboration and in turn customer experience.

Autonomy's truly innovative features such as Conceptual Search, Automatic Clustering and Hyperlinking add an unprecedented level of intelligence to data access and processing. For example, Conceptual Search retrieves documents which are thematically similar even if they don't feature the keywords used in the original query thus moving beyond traditional approaches. Automatic Clustering provides employees with a bird's eye view of data in the organization thus allowing them to spot hot trends and topics and to adopt a proactive approach to customer queries. Finally, IDOL's unique Automatic Hyperlinking feature suggests pertinent documents that are contextually linked to the original text thus ensuring that professionals enjoy full visibility over relevant corporate content.

To improve collaboration and avoid duplication of work among staff dispersed in offices around the globe, Autonomy IDOL helps Energy and Utility companies build communities of expertise to promote collaboration and fuel innovation. One company even indexed its work orders that were generated as part of plant maintenance operations. Conceptual profiles of each user are created based on browsing, content consumption and content contribution facilitating knowledge sharing and increasing productivity by bringing experts together.

Energy and Utility organizations are required to find sustainable ways to meet ever-growing demand while tackling climate change and a gradual depletion of accessible natural resources. Consumers have become aware of these environmental challenges and expect their supplier to adapt their businesses so that their activity has as little impact as possible on the planet.

The website has become a heavily-relied on means for suppliers to provide information to consumers, to demonstrate their commitment to environmental challenges and provide the tools to help customers conserve energy and resources. However, with the competition merely one click away, companies need to ensure they communicate and engage effectively with their customer base. With Autonomy's intelligent Web Content Management solution, energy and utility suppliers can very easily, and with limited IT involvement, manage, control and distribute content anywhere, anytime thus delivering targeted and up-to-date information to their customers. This enables organizations to keep web content fresh and timely which is critical to keeping site visitors engaged.

Autonomy has also been helping Energy and Utilities vendors conduct experiments in real time by changing elements on their website and then determining which ones are the most effective for that page. This helps vendors find out which content fares better with its customers and prospects and helps improve conversion rates, including click-throughs, registrations, downloads, page views or other measures of online success – not to mention revenue. This is a great tool to win over new business or make sure customers are kept up to date with developments and activities.

The political and economic volatility in the Energy and Utilities sector has resulted in complex, high-value disputes across a range of jurisdictions. Faced with increasing government intervention and stronger regulations, these firms need to have the tools to stay compliant and respond to disclosure requests. Autonomy has helped curb the rise in contentious matters thanks to its end-to-end eDiscovery platform which uniquely spans the entire Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) to perform critical eDiscovery tasks such as Early Case Assessment (ECA), Legal Hold, Collection, Preservation, Processing, Legal Search, Review and Production.

Autonomy's eDiscovery solutions can handle more than 100 languages, more than 1,000 file formats and 400+ repositories, which, for global Energy and Utilities organizations, is a necessity to find content and comply with regulations. Thanks to its understanding of the meaning of all forms of information, Autonomy IDOL can manage, discover and produce large quantities of energy and utility information automatically to comply with mandated regulations and respond to disclosure requests.

Consumers use myriad channels to interact with Energy and Utility companies including their website, contact center and, increasingly, social media. With the tools to understand these interactions, Energy and Utility organizations can collect insight about their customers and prospects to deliver a more personal and targeted experience, increase customer loyalty and reduce churn.

Autonomy's Multichannel Optimization is unique in understanding customer interactions across all channels. Thanks to advanced speech recognition and content management functionalities, Autonomy can link the call center and the web to find patterns and insight into customer interactions thereby reacting to potentially damaging conversations or taking advantage of potential emerging trends. This can enable an effective delivery of targeted offers and promotions or information across all channels based on real-time insights.

In addition, Autonomy's Social Media Analysis can ensure that Energy and Utilities companies are leveraging the vast amounts of customer and market information available in social media – including audio and video files.

Customer service is becoming a vital competitive differentiator for Energy & Utilities companies. Autonomy brings together previously disparate contact center and enterprise systems into a single streamlined and automated solution to automatically link contact center interactions to corresponding information on business and call center performance and deliver actionable information in real-time to improve customer service. If a customer calls its water supplier with a complaint, Autonomy's innovative voice technology can understand the conversation and deliver the appropriate content to the agent so they can reassure and inform the customer. This can also be used for compliance purposes, where Autonomy can record and archive every audio conversation for subsequent review.

EDF Energy, created from the merger of London Electricity and Seeboard Group of companies, is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. Based in London with operations across the country, EDF Energy employs 11,300 people. More than a quarter of the UK population depends on EDF Energy for electricity.

When EDF Energy found that 50 percent of its total storage capacity was taken up by personal archiving files, the IT department looked to email archiving for a solution. The energy conglomerate chose Autonomy's Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) for Exchange because of its high performance and superior storage and compliance capabilities.

With the Autonomy EAS installation, EDF Energy met both its operational and compliance needs. Personal archive files were eliminated, with email storage reduced from 4TB to 1TB, directly saving the company $200,000 in disk space expansion. End user productivity and access to information was greatly improved, with the introduction of full text searching and the elimination of corruption-prone PST files. IT productivity also benefited from the solution, with backup times reduced by more than 30%.

Autonomy's solution ensures the company's ongoing compliance with the regulations of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (OFGEM).

A municipally owned energy company in a regulated market, CPS Energy serves a customer base of 670,000 electric customers and more than 315,000 natural gas customers in and around San Antonio, Texas. Anticipating deregulation, CPS Energy began focusing on its ability to attract and retain customers to grow its business in an open market.

CPS Energy deployed the Autonomy Interwoven Web Content Management (WCM) solution. The WCM solution powers the CPS Energy Website enables CPS Energy employees to access, share, and collaborate on critical business content—from contracts and invoices to competitive research—in a centralized workspace.

With Autonomy Interwoven, CPS Energy was able to automate processes, improve productivity, and distribute information across the company. Improved customer service through the website helps the company attract and retain customers.

Shell, is a multinational petroleum company of Dutch and British origins. The company's main business is the exploration, production, processing, transportation, and marketing of petroleum and natural gas. Shell operates in over 140 countries and employs 108,000 staff.

Shell sought to make sense of its wealth of “unstructured” data by implementing Autonomy's Pan-Enterprise Search solution. This solution analyzes data from various different locations, sources and languages, enabling staff to have easy access to the organization's global information. By aggregating all of the company's information into one single access point, Shell is now able to better leverage its data assets, avoid duplication of effort and ensure that its employees get the right information, when they need it.

The explosion of unstructured information – emails, audio, video, web content, chat and more – has led to a convergence of information management, information governance and eDiscovery to control the growing volume of content in the face of regulatory pressure.

This is why Shell chose Autonomy's Records Management to fully automate the retention and disposition of business documents within the enterprise which, unlike traditional solutions, is done by understanding the meaning of all information across the enterprise regardless of data type, language or repository. Thanks to Autonomy, Shell was able to place litigation holds on documents that are subject to public disclosure requests and/or litigation needs.

With the energy sector under increased scrutiny, Shell also saw the need for Autonomy's award-winning eDiscovery solution to identify, preserve and collect information in response to legal and regulatory matters. Autonomy is the only company that brings together every component of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) onto one platform. The platform's innovative "Discover-in-Place" capabilities allow law firms to link directly to relevant enterprise information for a particular investigation or case, resulting in radically compressed timeframes for the eDiscovery process. Autonomy provides Shell with a fast, proactive, automated, and cost-efficient way to identify and hold relevant information for a case.

Progress Energy is a regionally-based energy provider that services Florida and the Carolinas, two of the fastest growing areas of the country. Progress Energy includes two major utilities that serve more than 3.1 million customers in these areas.

With a dedication to excellence in operations and customer service, Progress Energy wanted to ensure that valuable communication during their agent-customer interactions was fully leveraged. Progress Energy needed a tool that could help them effectively understand these conversations to continue optimizing contact center performance, while at the same time gathering valuable customer intelligence that could be used to improve business processes and delivered services. To gain this functionality, Progress Energy deployed Autonomy etalk's voice and screen recording, performance evaluations and speech analytics solutions in three sites across 1,000 agents.

Within a month of using Qfiniti Explore to find calls for agent monitoring sessions, the quality staff saved enough time to perform one extra monitoring session per agent for the month without requiring any additional staff members. This single item enabled Progress to increase quality productivity by 50 percent. Using Explore, Progress was able to highlight a number of issues that were previously unknown to the organization, such as lengthy on-hold times and high volumes of agents asking customers to call back. By uncovering these trends, Progress is now able to deploy targeted training and coaching that will help them increase first call resolution and decrease talk times, both improving customer satisfaction and reducing call costs.

Progress Energy is able to leverage Qfiniti Explore for compliance and risk management initiatives in the contact center, such as compliance with Florida's Public Service Commission (PSC), which performs financial, billing and verification audits for the electric and gas industries in the state. Progress was able to prove compliance with the PSC's regulations by searching for calls in Explore that contained a credit or billing arrangement and playing them back in the Qfiniti Desktop. With this tool, Progress was immediately able to prove they were meeting compliance requirements without having to play back a number of unnecessary calls or wait for a call to come in that was relevant to the audit. This simplified the audit process for Progress Energy, enabling them to focus less time on audits and more time on improving critical customer service and business operations.