IVR

A slew of utility companies have opted to renew their SaaS (News - Alert) service contracts with a Columbus, Ohio-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR) consulting and custom application development company.

 

Companies including Florida Power & Light, Central Hudson Gas & Electric, Dayton Power & Light, and Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative have signed SaaS service contracts with ARCOS, Inc. for multiple years. Under the agreements, ARCOS provides customers with dispatch, scheduling, and callout rule enforcement consistency, as well as reductions in O&M expense, recovered meter revenue, customer satisfaction, employee and public safety, and reduced CAIDI, the company said.

 

"Customer renewals are essential to the continued growth of the company,” said Mitch McLeod, president of ARCOS, Inc., in a statement. “The ARCOS renewal rate is 100 percent over the past five years, which is a tribute to all areas of the company, particularly our customer service and development departments.”

 

ARCOS’ customer base is made up of small and large companies. Florida Power & Light Company, for instance, is one of the fastest-growing electric utilities in the nation. In 2007, the company’s average number of customer accounts grew by 87,000 to 4.5 million. Meanwhile, Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. serves about 300,000 electric customers and 74,000 natural gas customers in New York State's Mid-Hudson River Valley.

 

Dayton Power & Light, a regional energy company and its principal subsidiary, The Dayton Power and Light Co., supply power to 514,000 customers throughout West Central Ohio. Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, a member-owned electric cooperative, serves more than 142,000 customers in four Southern Maryland counties.

 

ARCOS is an IVR consulting and custom application development company. Its flagship product is ARCOS Crew Callout — a Web-based communication and response platform that automates the complex crew callout process and enables instant notification of employees and customers.

 

The company says its system is the most widely used automated crew callout solution in the industry. More than 40 electric and gas utility companies nationwide are using ARCOS, the firm said. Specifically, the top five Fortune 500 utilities represented by Dominion Resources, Duke Energy, FPL Group, Exelon, and Southern Company use ARCOS services.

 

As TMC (News - Alert) earlier reported, Duke Energy Corp. selected ARCOS Crew Callout Enterprise Edition last year to automate and optimize its crew callout process and add efficiencies to the resource and real-time employee availability management.