Customer Success
Georgia Power | Print |
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are the keys to the century-long success of Georgia Power. The company motto, "A Citizen Wherever We Serve," provides the vision to continue this tradition of delivering award-winning customer service.

ImageGeorgia Power, a unit of the Southern Company, has been providing electricity to Georgia for more than 100 years and takes pride in being a positive force in the state of Georgia.

A top priority of Georgia Power is taking good care of its customers, keeping reliability high and power rates low. Finding ways to control costs in its contact centers, while maintaining high levels of customer service, is a key component in this strategy.

Utility companies face a unique challenge of having to deal with unexpected increases of call volume during service disruptions. The Georgia Power Customer Care Center maintains 24 by 7 coverage, and employs more than 300 agents to handle customer phone calls and emails, with the ability to use 200 other employees in local offices to handle customer calls if needed. Georgia Power handles an average of 6.5 million phone calls each year.

Georgia Power, and other Southern Company subsidiaries in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, began searching for a proven, cost-effective solution capable of consolidating forecasting, scheduling and management functions across its sites. After a thorough evaluation of different technologies - which included reviewing automated workforce management systems from several vendors - Southern Company selected award-winning TotalView® Workforce Management from IEX.

"When we selected the TotalView system as our workforce management tool, a key driver was its single server architecture that supports multiple ACDs," said W. Harvey Ellis, operations manager for Georgia Power Customer Care Center, "TotalView supported Southern Company's need for a single solution that did not exclude the autonomy of each operating company but still allowed a collective view."

Today at Georgia Power, customer care managers use the TotalView solution to: forecast contact volumes, generate individualized agent schedules, monitor agent adherence and productivity, schedule meetings and plan for vacation and holiday time for its two contact centers.

Prior to implementing TotalView, turnover was a big issue at Georgia Power. Since then, the company has reduced resignations by 42 percent. Over the last two years alone, Georgia Power has avoided hiring and training 47 employees, at a cost $6000 per new employee, amounting to an overall cost savings of $282,000.

TotalView has also heavily reduced overtime costs. Since 1998, Georgia Power lowered overtime costs by 76 percent, producing savings of $400,000 per year. Despite reductions in overtime, service levels have continued to improve steadily.

Benchmarked against 1998, the year before TotalView was implemented, service levels have improved 44 percent. Average speed of answer has improved equally, dropping by 70 seconds.

"After years of erratic and declining performance, we have seen amazing consistency in service levels as well as steady improvement in our customer satisfaction index," said Ellis, "Our results since implementing the TotalView system speak volumes."

Southern Company ranked number one in utility company customer satisfaction according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which measures satisfaction of residential customers. J.D. Power and Associates also recently recognized the company for highest overall customer satisfaction among residential and small business utility customers in the South.

For more information about Georgia Power, please visit their website .