Energy & Utilities Revenue Assurance

Bankruptcy (B2B)

Energy & Utilities (E&U) companies, typically, have a sizable number of C&I customers who bring considerable revenues. But when these customers find themselves in financial trouble, it could translate into defaulted payments and potentially into bad debts worth millions of dollars. This is a situation that every E&U company would like to avoid.

It would be impractical to pursue each of the commercial accounts in the company’s portfolio. It is thus imperative for companies to identify vulnerable commercial accounts leveraging data, and build quick and robust communication strategies for their troubled C&I customers to lessen the risk impact on their revenues.

If companies choose to merely rely on their internal interactions (with their commercial customer accounts) to identify vulnerabilities, that would be grossly insufficient. Rather, WNS can help with its holistic approach, underpinned by the analysis of the C&I customer’s interaction with the E&U company, its financial metrics, stock market data, press coverage and macro-economic data impacting the overall industry, to gauge the customer’s vulnerability to insolvency.

WNS’ Bankruptcy solution model served as an early alert for a leading U.S. utility company, which could develop customized business strategies for its commercial customers that were vulnerable to insolvency. The analysis helped accurately identify one such account (and categorize it into the ‘high-risk’ bracket), which filed for bankruptcy, despite showing no clear signs of risks.

What We Offer: A Complete Suite of Financial Health Indicators

• Bankruptcy Forecast Model that predicts the likelihood of commercial customers declaring bankruptcy in the future
• Financial Ratios that help support the bankruptcy prediction with historical indicators of financial instability
• Consolidated Dashboards that cover news event analysis, ratios and model predictions to analyze customers individually and across industry domains

Low-income Customers

In the event of market-wide financial challenges, low-income customers pose the highest risk for E&U companies. Therefore, it is crucial to understand their needs and offer right-fit solutions that are best-suited to their situation. However, it is not advisable to club all low-income customers into the same bracket – there’s no one-size-fits-all. It is important to segment these customers appropriately to understand their unique situations, needs and capabilities.

This focused understanding will help the utility company to create tailor-made campaigns such as energy efficiency, budget billing, payment arrangements and target the customers appropriately.

WNS can help E&U companies create low-income customer segmentation using various demographic, transactional and smart meter usage data to improve conversion rates, increase stickability for programs and help quantify impact of programs on debt curation.

Vulnerable Customers

Even before COVID-19, understanding which customers would come under the broad umbrella of ‘vulnerable’ was a key challenge for utilities companies. During the current uncertain climate, utility companies are playing their part by communicating clearly and supporting their customers as much as possible. Suppliers are therefore putting in place support measures for people on prepayment meters, people and families who need to self-isolate or take steps to reduce social contact, and people who may otherwise be in vulnerable situations.

The problem, however, is how to identify who is vulnerable?

WNS can help utilities by leveraging text and speech analytics solutions that are designed to uncover customer insights coming through the contact center – and this can be done at scale. Unstructured conversational data is transformed into structured data that can be searched, tagged and safely stored for short and long-term analysis. Analyzing 100 percent of customer conversations with automated tagging can provide energy and water companies with a view into the scale and common needs of vulnerable customers, and any trends surrounding those needs.