Stream Energy Adopts Genesys’ Strategic Plan and Solutions to Transform and Improve its Customer Service

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), announced that Stream Energy, a major electricity retailer in Texas’s deregulated utilities market, has adopted a Genesys-designed three-year plan to provide Stream customers with unsurpassed service – even as the firm pursues aggressive growth and expansion into new markets.

Stream is one of the fastest growing of a new breed of power companies that compete in unregulated markets for new customers, and it has established a passionate commitment to customer service as a foundation for growth. The “Transformational Roadmap” developed by Genesys Business Consulting (GBC) details a technology and management approach that keeps Dallas-based Stream a step ahead of business expansion to ensure consistent customer service. GBC - a provider of strategic advisory services around the areas of contact center technology, business objectives, operations and process - embraced Stream’s business strategy, uncovered service needs, and developed a strategic plan that guides the company as it weaves customer service processes into departments beyond the contact center.

“In the past, utilities didn’t really need to be concerned with having excellent customer service because they had a captive audience,” said Greg Martin, manager special projects, Stream. “Deregulated markets, on the other hand, allow us to compete for customers with a strong emphasis on customer service at the core. This is a paradigm shift in the way that Stream will do business. Customer service used to be something that only existed in the contact center. Now, all units will eventually be linked so that Stream can leverage its full capabilities to optimize the customer experience.”

Stream’s Transformational Roadmap outlines a wide range of technologies including workforce management tools to improve agent utilization, agent scripting to improve service, skill-based routing to deliver callers to the best resource, and business process routing to link the Stream contact center with other departments. The roadmap also calls for integration of multi-channel interactions (voice, e-mail, chat and Web), offers Stream customers speech-enabled self-service, and provides Stream agents with information captured during self-service interactions to better help callers who opt to switch to assisted-service.

Stream will also implement Genesys’ recommendation to institute an automated customer satisfaction survey that will help shape contact center policies regarding self-service, hold times, agent help, e-mail usage, Web contacts and other issues.

John Quaglietta, manager of Genesys Business Consulting, said: “The satisfaction surveys will help Stream identify customers who may be considering another provider. Using skill-based routing, Stream can direct such customers to a loyalty group of agents for extra care. As a whole, the recommendations within the roadmap form a customer service ecosystem that Stream will put into action.”

Stream will begin to implement the roadmap in the summer of 2007 when the firm installs Genesys Voice Platform, Virtual Hold for Genesys, and speech-enabled self-service and assisted service. The Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) Platform will form the basis of all the applications that Stream adds as it goes forward. The modular, dynamic nature of the CIM Platform allows Stream investments in additional Genesys software to integrate with existing infrastructure and increase value by adding new features.

“Genesys Business Consulting took the time to really understand Stream’s business realities and as a result was able to create a logical and applicable roadmap rather than a pie in the sky strategy that we couldn’t use,” said Martin. “Genesys was focused on our success, not on building a pipeline of business.”