5.2 Energy

Company: PPL EnergyPlus West

Profile

PPL EnergyPlus is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The company markets and sells wholesale and retail energy in 42 states and Canada and delivers energy to nearly six million customers in the United States alone. Started 80 years ago, the company believes that the future belongs to energy companies that understand customer needs and are dedicated to providing competitively priced energy.

Challenge

Whenever an agent is required to negotiate a price over the phone, that agent is essentially creating a verbal contract. PPL EnergyPlus realized that it is critical that those verbal contacts be recorded and archived for liability purposes. By recording calls from their digital Nortel PBX, the company found that they could eliminate or settle disputes and head off costly nonproductive litigation. However, its reel-to-reel recorder had problems with line noise.

Solution

Voice Print International (VPI) was contacted to assess the call center environment; it created a custom solution that records clear, crisp audio. This vendor solution solved a number of issues for PPL EnergyPlus. VPI's system is based on an open architecture that the company was able to integrate easily with its existing system. Maintenance is completely hassle-free because the system is very reliable and replacement components are available at any computer store.

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved with this vendor solution:

Calls that used to take 10 to 30 minutes to retrieve can now be retrieved in seconds using a database "query" to find calls
Significant savings in time and money in the call retrieval process