Business Development Team Spotlight Interview

Tell us a little bit about your role and how it relates to the business experience.

I’m not new to Duke Energy. I’ve worked here for over 30 years across different parts of the company and served in various roles, everything from working in the call center to supporting storm restoration. My current role as a principal digital strategy manager means I am supporting all things that relate to the online business customer experience. When we launched the business experience, we knew we were going to add additional functions and make changes based on feedback from our customers. In my role, I am focused on working with technical developers and our business operations to prioritize and build the changes our customers most want to see.

How would you describe the new business experience to our customers?

In short, the online business experience allows customers to manage their business accounts with a variety of self-service options. Customers can view and pay bills, view and track energy usage, sign up for billing and payment programs and, if needed, invite others to receive account information notifications and have access to managing their accounts.

This is a pretty big change from our previous online experience, which served both our residential customers and our small and medium business customers. This new online experience was developed specifically for our business customers because we know their day to day can be so different.

What excites you about the new business experience?

We know most customers come to the website to pay their bills, but we really wanted to make this a seamless experience. That said, one thing that I am most excited about is customers can now select up to 100 accounts to pay (through their bank) with a single transaction. Not only that, but they can pay as one combined payment or as individual payments for each account. It really is so much easier than it was in the past where they had to make individual payments.

We know there were some frustrations with the online experience for our customers in the past. What is an enhancement that you think business customers will benefit from the most?

We are always listening and collecting feedback from our customers and have already implemented several enhancements. For example, we’ve added several reports (reports like the Final Bill Report, Transfer Balance Report and Totalized Meter Report) to the business experience that allow you to self-serve versus having to pick up the phone and call the Customer Contact Center to get the information you’re looking for. Another thing on the horizon that we hope to have done by this fall is the ability for customers to consolidate their business partners in the digital experience. We know this has been a big pain point for a lot of customers – so we want to fix it.

What has been one of the biggest challenges with launching a new business experience?

I think the biggest challenge has been change, not only adjusting to the change of the overall experience but managing the expectations of how long things can really take. Although the former experience did not meet all business needs, our customers knew how to manage their experience and complete the tasks they needed to. The other side is on our end. We know that there are areas that are not perfect and there are great ideas from customers’ requests that we would love to implement, but all of that takes time. We are just as eager as our users to make this experience the best it can possibly be.

What can customers look forward to in future iterations of the business experience?

There are several exciting things coming soon. We’ve heard overwhelmingly that customers are looking for the ability to mail in a check payment instead of paying digitally. At the end of this month, customers will have access to a spreadsheet that can download their unique data to be sent in with their check for payment. No more worrying about including payment slips from a paper bill! It also makes it easier on our payment processing team which can easily scan the spreadsheet to apply payments to the correct accounts.

Another sneak peek is that this fall, customers with a large number of accounts will have the ability to consolidate different groupings of accounts to make it easier to configure the online experience the way they want. We know that these customers have been asking for this, and we are happy to be able to deliver a solution.