Maintaining a call center is essential to a utility, but it involves investment and expense in both technology and workforce. Outsourcing call center functions can cost significantly, as well. But Pivotal Home Solutions actually helped two utilities turn their new mover calls into a source of revenue. 

Pivotal Home Solutions proposed to receive the utilities’ customer move-in calls at Pivotal’s own eight-time J.D. Power award-winning call center. The company worked with each utility to agree upon call scripting, call flow, key performance indicators and a revenue model that would be advantageous to both the utility and Pivotal. 

Agreements were reached, and Pivotal began receiving the move-in calls. After a Pivotal call center representative would help to set up the caller’s new utility service, the representative would transition the call to an opportunity for the customer to learn about Pivotal’s repair and maintenance programs available for their new home’s HVAC systems, service lines, and appliances — programs which often could carry the added convenience of being billed through customer’s utility bill. The value-added customer convenience of utility billing would lead to a continuing stream of revenue for the utility. Finally, with one utility partner, the customer was invited to have their call transferred to an outside company that could help them establish other essential new-home services — phone, cable, and internet service, and more. Talk about simplifying a difficult process! As a result of this model, the utilities saw an overhead expense turn into a source of non-regulated revenue. Over a four-year span, one of these utilities saw Pivotal add an average of nearly 160,000 contracts per year and generate an average of more than $1.5 million per year in profit sharing.

For more information on Pivotal Home Solutions call handling services, please contact Rob Gilpin at 1.224.828.9969 or Robert.Gilpin@amwater.com.