Today, utility companies are grappling with seemingly impossible pressures - to improve customer service, manage often ageing infrastructure, as well as balancing shareholder interests alongside the demands of tough regulatory bodies.

Fortunately, we can help by cutting costs through legacy network consolidation, improving the customer experience and making operations run more smoothly.

Call centres: Smarter communications

Typically, customers don’t call their utility company until things go wrong - then, everyone calls. A mains leak or outage can send call volumes rocketing. But these peaks can now be accommodated. Incoming callers can be located down to street level and presented with the relevant recorded announcement. This frees up call centre staff to handle other calls, all within the timescales defined by regulatory SLA.

Using Presentation Numbers can significantly speed up call handling. Experience shows operator loads drop by up to 70%, improving response times for other incoming calls. Our Customer Contact Solutions are fully outsourced, yet your people retain the flexibility of an expensive, in-house installation. This delivers both low capital outlay and a high degree of control.

Infrastructure management: Telemetry keeps tabs

Is monitoring thousands of miles of infrastructure around the clock impossible? No, with our remote telemetry and versatile IP networks, you have the ability to do just that - continuously and in real time, while simultaneously cutting costs.

Always-on broadband:

Low-cost, high-quality broadband access into our IPVPN product:

For installations well off the beaten track, our LAN Solutions can deliver wireless links to the monitoring network.

Infrastructure security: Protecting your investment

An IP network commissioned throughout your sites for real-time telemetry can have enormous capacity for other applications. Just plug in our IP CCTV cameras and that same network will carry live images of your key infrastructure - pylons, reservoirs, pumping stations and substations - to any other point on the network. Far more scalable, flexible and cost effective than yesterday’s analogue CCTV systems, IP CCTV will help you keep your eye on the ball - wherever you are, near or far.

Our IP CCTV product co-exists with other services, such as remote telemetry, on your IPVPN or Ethernet network, giving you low cost, superior capabilities for monitoring, computerised storage and rapid retrieval.

WiFi hotspots: Keeping field personnel connected

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. So, why not extract maximum value from your existing unmanned sites by turning them into inexpensive WiFi hotspots? It’s all possible, now that engineers can connect to the operations network without needing site access, or even getting out of their vehicles. Which adds up to more visits per day, higher productivity, tighter monitoring and reduced overheads.

Our LAN Solutions portfolio includes services for designing and installing WiFi networks. Site-to- Site Connectivity solutions can provide inexpensive ways of linking even remote locations to the rest of your network.

IP versatility: One network, many applications

Versatility is the key to the power for our Next Generation network technologies. Today’s cutting-edge applications in energy and utilities - smart call centres, real time telemetry, security monitoring and remote inspections - all run on digital, IP-based technologies, not independent analogue systems. This means that the network you install for your essential needs will also be the backbone for a host of other powerful applications.

What do you want your network to do? Choose from an array of applications, technologies and enabling solutions - Site-to-Site Connectivity, LAN Solutions, IP Multimedia, Contact Centre Solutions - or review our entire suite of Products and Solutions. If you’d like to discuss solutions matched to your business needs, just get in touch.