Avaya voice and digital channels, Edenor’s key to delivering the best experience to 9 million consumers

Omnichannel for +5 million interactions

5.5 million calls

Edenor is Argentina’s largest energy distribution company, supplying this vital service to more than 3 million customers distributed in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, which represents supplying energy to more than 9 million people.

“Currently”, explains Oscar Kovalow, Edenor's Telecommunications Manager, “our energy system has more than 80 substations throughout the metropolitan area. The company has more than 4,700 employees, the company itself is listed on the stock market of Buenos Aires and the United States.”

In this context, the demands of customer requirements are increasing and in their experiences, every interaction must be satisfactory. “At Edenor, we annually receive 5.5 million calls, 200,000 social network messages, 100,000 SMS and more than 80,000 emails, we have about 200 simultaneous agents who assist them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,” says Hernán González, Modernization and Customer Experience Manager at Edenor. “Overall our customer satisfaction with the service equals 82 percent.”

Upgrading to an Omnichannel Contact Center

With such a volume of interactions, the Telecommunications Manager confirms that one of the technological challenges they faced was “to convert our call center into a more effective omnichannel contact center, in order to be able to offer our customers a 360-degree view of their interactions. This way, we would not only be able to unify all of our service channels on a single platform, but also optimize the service channels and incorporate new functionalities in an agile way to improve the quality of service and customer experience.

“Our goal is to make more channels available for customers,” says Hernán González, “and to turn the most frequent contact reasons into self-managed ones, leaving the personalized contacts for those cases that do require it. On the other hand, we find it important to understand what is currently done well and what can be improved based on the customer's perception.”

The Fundamental Pillars of Energy

World Class Platform

According to both executives, with Avaya solutions, the company practically provided them with a world-class platform, with a long-term roadmap: “Avaya allowed us to meet omnichannel requirements on a single platform that was rapidly scalable and highly available, which could contain all voice channels and digital channels in an integrated way both in the historical and online reports of all interactions,” Kovalow points out

Avaya solutions provided a technological capacity of 320 voice agents and digital channels and outbound campaigns (voice, digital channels) in an integrated way.

• 260 voice agents
• 420 voice access channels
• 160 IVR ports
• 60 video agents
• 40 digital channels agents
• 80 video customer service stations

For the customer, this integration represents a qualitative leap in their experience with Edenor: “It helped us improve segmentation, so that calls follow the right operator without the need for transfers or additional waiting time, and it also drove us to reduce the average handle time, which became a key factor that contributed to a 19-percent point increase in self-managed services,” said González.

Synchrony with Consumers

According to Kovalow, from now on, this step and the digital transformation of the electrical network will be the fundamental pillars that Edenor has already started some time ago, “but we must go deeper in the coming years to reach our end customers.

In everything that has to do with the Internet of Things (IoT); we are improving our network to provide connectivity and demand to provide real-time information to our customers, while also adapting our network in sync with renewable energy consumers and electric cars.

Looking to the Future

For Hernán González, there are more goals to be achieved in the immediate future: “From the point of view of customer service we imagine even more self-management, more automation to carry out procedures or consultations from anywhere, without having to move to an office. We must bring personalized service to self-management.

“Currently,” he adds, “we are working mainly on several fronts; the automation of personalized call campaigns, the application of speech analytics to improve the quality of service, the incorporation of selfmanagement in written channels and the incorporation of a new service channel: WhatsApp, in which we are working on automating the change of ownership of customers.”

To conclude, Oscar Kovalow points out that the joint work with Avaya has more goals ahead of it: “Looking to the future, we are working with Avaya to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) with our bot and to include greater automation in our digital channels.”