Utilities Contact Center in SAP C4C - Rich Feature Set for Utilities

The Utilities Contact Center (UCC) in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer offers truly rich functionality for utility company Customer Service Representatives. In our current C4C implementation, we've activated the features outlined below. We'll also be demonstrating them at the SAP for Utilities conference in Huntington Beach next month, running C4C off an iPad to demonstrate its out-of-the-box mobility.

Utility Financials: displays the customer account balance, open items, invoices, payments, dunning notices, installment plans, meter reads, premise, bill reversals, and interactions on service tickets.

Utilities 360: displays a hierarchy of the Contract Account, Premise, Contract, Installation and Device for the customer in a parent/child relationship.

Utilities Overview: displays a list of the contract accounts for the customer including invoices, service orders, and meter reads.

Move-In/Move-Out: walks the CSR through move-in steps to a premise, and through move-out steps from a vacating premise.

Installment Plans: creates a payment arrangement in which the customer balance is spread out over a number of days, weeks, or months as permitted, and changes the amount due immediately after.

Service Orders: creates a new service order for field technician work. Service orders are immediately visible to planners for release and to dispatch field techs to premises. Mobile updates are provided as well.

Bill Reversal/Re-Bill: enables the CSR to reverse one or more billing documents, or the entire customer invoice. Also allows manual entry of meter reads, and re-billing  of contract accounts.

Transfers: transfers an existing contract account to a new service address for an existing customer (business partner).

When a CSR uses these features, SAP C4C provides dynamic navigation links and user prompts based on the context of the particular task at hand. This reduces clutter on the screen and makes the interface even more intuitive. See it yourself at the utilities conference.

SAP transaction CIC0 nearing EOL, replaced by Utilities Contact Center (UCC)

Utilities currently running SAP’s on-premise CRM solution, IS-U/CR&B (a.k.a. CCS), often rely on transaction CIC0 in the Customer Interaction Center (CIC). They won’t be able to use it for long, however, as support for CIC0 will end when support for ECC 6.0 ends in 2025, and CIC0 is deprecated in SAP S/4HANA. As such, CIC0 is nearing end-of-life and must be replaced with something else.

The replacement for CIC0 is the Utilities Contact Center (UCC) offered in SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C), which integrates with the IS-U. While C4C has its own ticketing system resident in Cloud for Service, utilities using that alone would miss all of the benefits of integration with the IS-U. And that integration is absolutely critical for utility company CSRs to on-board new customers, transfer customers to new locations within the service territory, and help customers pay their bills by setting up installment plans.

Given that, we see two future alternatives for utilities: run SAP’s on-premise CRM solution with S/4HANA, or run the new Hybris Cloud for Customer SaaS solution. If a utility doesn’t already have the on-prem CRM deployed, we’d recommend using C4C. It provides rapid innovation cycles for easy access to new features; a bundled Fiori client for mobile users at low subscription prices; and offloads technical work so that IT can focus on other initiatives. In the coming weeks, we’ll discuss C4C’s benefits in greater detail.