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Energy & Utilities: An Industry with Dynamic Recording Needs 

October 4th, 2022

Written by John Joyce, Global Head of Communications Compliance

Blog, Enterprise Information Archiving

Everyone has an energy & utilities provider that plays a part in helping them live their normal, day-to-day life. From the pandemic-induced recession to extreme weather events, the energy and utilities industry has been challenged on the basis of reliability and resiliency while continuing to be spotlighted in the media.   

As reported by Deloitte in their 2022 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook, ensuring reliability and resiliency and maintaining security while keeping costs down continue to headline the industry. To address these challenges, the energy and utilities industry will continue to advance its “3D” transformation: decarbonization, digitalization, and decentralization.  

Wilmac has worked with many utility companies in the past but offers a unique perspective as digital transformation comes to the forefront of the industry. Energy & utility companies have several different services that require recording, which we’ll cover in the following paragraphs.  

1. Customer Service 

Digital transformation is a top five industry trend for utility companies as identified by Deloitte. Modernizing the grid does not only include harnessing clean energy; it also means adopting cloud platforms to make connecting with consumers simpler and more efficient. As customer expectations evolve and increase along with the communications technology available to them, companies need to be able to proactively respond to them in real time. Customers expect the brands they use to anticipate their needs, and the best way to do that is by adopting a cloud-based contact center platform like NICE CXone.  

CCaaS system allows a utilities customer service center to automate certain actions for faster service. Average call times increased substantially during the pandemic, which decreased operational efficiency and degraded the customer experience. Another common pain point in these contact centers is managing agent turnover amongst increasing desires to work from home and keeping agents satisfied in a high-stress position.   

By adopting an omnichannel platform, utilities companies become more flexible to answer the needs of their customers. An increasing number of channels means customers expect to be able to communicate on them, so a CCaaS platform is a necessity to open communications on those channels to serve customer needs. Recording these interactions is also key to understanding the customer journey and investing in the tools that will best serve a utility company’s unique group of customers.  

2. Energy Trading  

Energy trading is conducted by asset-trading companies that use production, demand, and price forecasting to optimize the revenue created from energy production. Similar to traders in the financial market, energy traders analyze pricing and demand trends in order to determine the ideal strategy for bidding in the energy market. The risks assumed with trading stocks are the same as trading energy assets.  

As the financial market is heavily regulated, so are energy traders. All communications are regulated, meaning they must be recorded and retained for compliance. Proactive compliance is a necessity in this space because one misstep or mistake in recording can lead to hefty fines by regulatory bodies and damage brand perception.  

3. Safety Emergencies  

Maintaining the infrastructures for energy, the electrical grid, and communications are daunting tasks. Organizations must always be planning, upgrading, and maintaining their technology in the face of volatile weather conditions, natural disasters, and safety emergencies. To effectively respond to these mission critical situations, utility companies must have a public safety recording solution in place to record, distribute, and archive the data for legal compliance purposes.  

An example of when an application like this would be of use is if someone’s gas heater combusted, causing a tragic accident in a house. In a situation like this, the homeowner immediately calls the utility company for assistance to respond to the emergency. These interactions are recorded for incident reconstruction so, when dealing with the police or other legal authorities, the whole view of the incident can be obtained with the assistance of the utility company.  

4. Voice Archiving  

The final recording concept we’ll address is in close connection with customer service, energy trading, and safety emergencies in energy and utilities. It involves archiving, retaining, and leveraging the recordings captured by the platforms within utility companies. Typically, recording platform vendors offer archiving and analytical solutions that are expensive add-ons to the current solution. Instead of being restricted to your current vendor, Wilmac offers a solution suite that allows you to unlock your recording data, automate retention periods and timely purging, search and replay, and leverage third party platforms for customer insight.  

From mission-critical emergency recording and cloud contact center systems to proactive compliance recording and voice archiving, Wilmac offers a full range of solutions and services that fit uniquely into several important parts of energy and utility companies. These parts don’t have to be separated by the different recorders being used within each group. Instead, with the help of Wilmac’s voice archiving suite, all recordings can be viewed and stored in one central location. The outcome is then decreased spend on archiving, a greater ability to leverage these recordings together for customer insights, and a single source of truth to pull from.   

If you’re an organization in the energy and utilities industry looking for a tenured, adaptable team to rely on for all the recording needs of your organization, consider Wilmac.

Contact Wilmac to schedule a discovery meeting so we can better understand and serve the needs of your company.  

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