Final Analysis for Account Coordinator Customer Tasks and Interactions

My most prominent deliverable for the course of my internship with SCE was to
analyze the interactions that our Account Coordinators were having with their
respective customers and then to look at the tasks that were being assigned in
order to suggest customer-specific self-service options or process improvements
that could be implemented to increase customer satisfaction and employee
efficiency. To do this, I pulled the top 5 interacted with customers from each ACs
pool of customers, since these were the most likely to yield an impact.
After analyzing the Tasks and Interactions of Suzie, Ryanne, Jamie, DeAnna, Cynthia,
Linda, Jennifer, Lori, Illiana, Denise, Chuck, Sharlene, and Adriana, I found that there
were very few customer-specific repeated interactions and subsequent tasks.
Instead, there were patterns across the interaction topics holistically. The following
list includes the most common interaction topic for the ACs in no particular order:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Request for Duplicate Bills

Request for Interval Data
Request for Rate Analysis
CRM Contact Information Update

Other than option 4, I believe that all of these topics have potential for self-service
options. I do not think that CRM contact information should be a self-service option
editable by the customer because the risk of a mistake being made and then a 3 rd
party receiving unprivileged information could lead to extreme, unintended
consequences. However, I believe that the other options could certainly be
constructed into viable self-service options utilizing SCE.com.
Although the first three topics listed were extremely common to all customers, I
cannot fathom a process improvement other than SCE.com that could be undergone
to more efficiently and effectively answer the customers requests, since the
questions are always account-specific and I did not find a pattern among which
accounts the data was being requested for. This suggestion was further validated by
the opinions of several ACs and AMs. Additionally, this solution seems to be in line
with our Public Roles Reset initiative, in which we are trying to give more
independence and responsibility to the customer.
I spoke with several Account Managers and Account Coordinators and they strongly
agreed that utilizing SCE.com more would be a smart process change. However,
they mentioned that the biggest obstacle with this process change would be to get
customers to actually use SCE.com. To overcome this hesitancy, there would need
to be a coordinated push by the marketing department. I suggest offering a
SCE.com school (much like outage school), to our biggest 3 rd party account
handlers to start. Before this can happen, though, SCE.com needs to be made much
simpler and user-friendly. I envision a website with the first three topics listed above
as selection options in which a user could simply enter the desired SA account
number and then request a duplicate bill, interval data, and or a rate analysis. I
recognize that there could be a security problem because CISR forms would be
irrelevant, since a customer could easily just give out its SA account IDs and

password. However, much like a personal computer, a users passwords and SA

account numbers are their responsibility to do with them what they will.
A different solution route that could be taken for this project would be to rather than
make the customer independent, transform the relationship into a more proactive
one on SCEs behalf, though this solution may not be in accordance with the Public
Roles Reset. To be proactive would be to provide the answers to customer inquiries
before the question even surfaces. As mentioned earlier, customer-specific
questions cannot be answered beforehand because there is no recognizable pattern.
However, the trend among interactions holistically could be countered in topic #3
and some lesser common topics, which will be stated later.
Topic #3 is a great candidate for creating a proactive customer relationship because
it does not require detail or instigation from the customer to perform. Additionally, it
is one of the most common roles of the AM to have with its customer, and so
proactively providing customers with Rate Analyses to ensure that they are on the
best rate will increase customer satisfaction. From my understanding, the ACs are
kept quite busy and so may not have time to perform or request of all these rate
analyses, however perhaps this could be a project passed along to the COE or
written as a computer program.
Additional options for a proactive SCE relationship with its customers are as
follows:

Whenever a customer opens a new account, the AM/AC ask if it needs

to be added to the current CISR so that the data will be available to the
3rd party when inevitably requested at a later date
Billing could send out an email when SCE receives a check to settle an
account balance; sometimes a customer or banking error would
prevent SCE from receiving a check and the customer would not find
out until they were hit with late fees
The server could automatically email a customer if it is going to default
to CPP

My last suggestion would be to re-evaluate the defined relationship between the

customer, AMs and ACs, in order to streamline communication. Often, the AMs are
asked questions by the customer to which they do not know the answer and then
the question is just forwarded to the AC. This method is inefficient and can cause
communication loopholes by forgetting the responsible party for tasks in CRM.
Instead, the customer should know what questions the AM can answer or otherwise
just send the inquiry to the AC, COE, or better yet, SCE.com.