Cus­tomer reim­burse­ment projects are often chal­leng­ing busi­ness ini­tia­tives for the mod­ern enter­prise to estab­lish and con­sis­tent­ly enact. Not only do such projects pose cer­tain account­ing dif­fi­cul­ties, but the sheer amount of data asso­ci­at­ed with reim­burse­ment requests can be dif­fi­cult to orga­nize and cen­tral­ize, lead­ing to lengthy cycle times in ful­fill­ing requests and neg­a­tive­ly impact­ing cus­tomer satisfaction.

Opt­ing to dig­i­tal­ly trans­form its his­tor­i­cal­ly inef­fi­cient process for cus­tomer reim­burse­ment, DTE Ener­gy—a Detroit-based diver­si­fied ener­gy com­pa­ny, with an elec­tric util­i­ty serv­ing 2.3 mil­lion cus­tomers and a nat­ur­al gas util­i­ty serv­ing 1.3 mil­lion cus­tomers in Michi­gan — recent­ly began lever­ag­ing SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud to process cus­tomers’ reim­burse­ment requests more effec­tive­ly through its Home Pro­tec­tion Plus (HPP) pro­gram. Inte­grat­ing this new busi­ness solu­tion with SAP part­ner solu­tions from Open­Text and Smart Ener­gy Water (SEW), DTE built a solu­tion that fields cus­tomer requests prompt­ly and aggre­gates essen­tial data to reim­burse­ment requests.

Before DTE shares best prac­tices and lessons learned at the SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG con­fer­ence (Oct. 9 – 11 in Chica­go), Jen McAdams, Strate­gic Mar­ket Plan­ning & Devel­op­ment Man­ag­er at DTE, and Srini­vas Sas­try, Archi­tect at DTE, sat down with ASUG to dis­cuss how they imple­ment­ed this new reim­burse­ment program. 

Shed­ding the Lega­cy Solution

When orga­ni­za­tions lever­age out­dat­ed and out­sized solu­tions over a long peri­od of time, this often leads to an ​“epiphany” moment, in which employ­ees real­ize their solu­tion is hold­ing the busi­ness back from con­tin­ued growth. 

Accord­ing to Sas­try, mul­ti­ple busi­ness units were at one point lever­ag­ing in-house sys­tems and process­es to man­age ser­vice tick­ets. This dis­or­ga­nized approach to reim­burse­ment work­flows, with data and doc­u­ments spread all over the DTE plat­form, gave lim­it­ed vis­i­bil­i­ty to cus­tomers, lim­it­ing them from access­ing key infor­ma­tion about how their claim was being processed. Part of the issue was that SAP Busi­ness Process Excep­tion Man­age­ment (BPEM) was being used to man­age tick­ets with­in this lega­cy sys­tem. ​“BPEM wasn’t built for that func­tion,” Sas­try said. 

After inves­ti­gat­ing inter­nal­ly, McAdams said it was read­i­ly appar­ent that DTE need­ed to trans­form past its ​“aging data­base” and improve the cus­tomer jour­ney by inte­grat­ing with SAP for a smoother, more vis­i­ble reim­burse­ment pro­gram. In the end, the orga­ni­za­tion decid­ed it need­ed a flex­i­ble solu­tion that could be lever­aged across mul­ti­ple busi­ness units. Addi­tion­al­ly, DTE also want­ed to align with its cur­rent SAP invest­ment and use SAP part­ners to help build a more effec­tive reim­burse­ment tool. 

“We had invest­ed heav­i­ly in our SAP land­scape, and we were lean­ing in for more plat­form-ori­ent­ed solu­tions, with inte­gra­tions and a built-in ecosys­tem,” said Sastry.

Obtain­ing Busi­ness Buy-In 

As DTE pur­sued this tech­nol­o­gy shift, McAdams and Sas­try had to man­age con­cerns about how the new solu­tion would impact operations. 

“Our biggest wor­ry about the project was how it would affect cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions,” McAdams spec­i­fied, not­ing that stake­hold­ers need­ed to know how imple­ment­ing SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud would impact bill man­age­ment and how these trans­ac­tions would rep­re­sent­ed on the enterprise’s gen­er­al ledger. 

DTE under­took this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in the midst of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, so McAdams under­scored the impor­tance of con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exec­u­tives, even as the com­pa­ny worked remote­ly. Explain­ing the finan­cial risk of con­tin­u­ing with DTE’s cur­rent oper­a­tional state under the lega­cy sys­tem went a long way toward get­ting exec­u­tive buy-in, as stake­hold­ers clear­ly under­stood cur­rent oper­a­tional issues and the poten­tial sit­u­a­tions that could arise with­out transformation. 

From a tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tive, Sas­try not­ed that his main goals for the project were to take the func­tion­al­i­ty demands from var­i­ous tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness cas­es and ​“iden­ti­fy how the orga­ni­za­tion was going to trans­form its tech­nol­o­gy land­scape to bet­ter serve the busi­ness.” A huge part of this process involved com­mu­ni­cat­ing in ​“busi­ness speak as opposed to tech­nol­o­gy speak,” he added, stress­ing that one key role the archi­tect plays is to con­nect an enter­prise’s IT and busi­ness sides to achieve orga­ni­za­tion-wide goals.

Inside the DTE Reim­burse­ment Solution 

Accord­ing to Sas­try, the new solu­tion can be broad­ly bro­ken down into five com­po­nents based on the new func­tion­al­i­ty that SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud — and SAP part­ners such as Open­Text and SEW — pro­vid­ed to DTE. 

First, the solu­tion enabled self-ser­vice claims sub­mis­sion, allow­ing cus­tomers to sub­mit claims online for the HPP pro­gram and request refunds as appro­pri­ate. Through the solu­tion, cus­tomers could attach doc­u­ments sup­port­ing their claims and access those from mobile devices. Using SAP Com­merce Cloud ​“as a land­ing page,” Sas­try explained, DTE lever­aged a SEW mod­ule, ​“Con­nect Me,” to build the front-end por­tal for cus­tomers. This SAP Com­merce Cloud solu­tion helped bol­ster the por­tal’s secu­ri­ty, scan­ning sub­mit­ted doc­u­ments and ensur­ing they did not con­tain harm­ful virus­es and mal­ware that could com­pro­mise the entire organization. 

Both Sas­try and McAdams not­ed how, once tick­ets were cre­at­ed, they want­ed to pro­vide an auto­mat­ed work­flow for the busi­ness, assign­ing tick­ets to nec­es­sary employ­ees who could act on requests and move them from sta­tus to sta­tus. SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud inte­grat­ed with SAP Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment, adding busi­ness part­ner and cus­tomer details to process tickets. 

DTE also want­ed to improve the over­all orga­ni­za­tion of attach­ments and data sub­mit­ted to the orga­ni­za­tion by cus­tomers as part of their reim­burse­ment claims. Sas­try not­ed that hav­ing all doc­u­ments in a ​“cen­tral­ized doc­u­ment depos­i­to­ry” was vital for DTE. ​“We want­ed to allow agents to be able to bring up a tick­et and have all the attach­ments includ­ed, so they could view them as inte­grat­ed units and act quick­ly than look­ing for infor­ma­tion in dif­fer­ent places,” he said. Lever­ag­ing Open­Text Extend­ed Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment (ECM), and its native inte­gra­tion to SAP CRM as well as SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud, allowed DTE to build out a wid­get con­nect­ing tick­ets to documents. 

The fourth part of the project involved estab­lish­ing mul­ti-chan­nel sta­tus change noti­fi­ca­tions, so cus­tomers would have more vis­i­bil­i­ty into the progress of their reim­burse­ment claims, which SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud and Sinch, anoth­er SAP part­ner, achieved. Final­ly, DTE Ener­gy want­ed to give its cus­tomer rep­re­sen­ta­tives more vis­i­bil­i­ty of ser­vice tick­ets, requir­ing DTE to match screens between SAP CRM and Open­Text Extend­ed ECM.

“It’s not just about the tick­et man­age­ment,” said Sas­try. ​“It’s about how the data gets flown in and how the data gets mod­i­fied and cre­at­ed. We pro­vid­ed an inte­grat­ed end-to-end man­age­ment of this busi­ness process.”

Lessons Learned

Con­sid­er­ing the suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of this solu­tion into the DTE tech­nol­o­gy stack, which has pro­vid­ed cus­tomers with self-ser­vice abil­i­ties and sped up pro­cess­ing times, McAdams advis­es oth­er orga­ni­za­tions about embark­ing on sim­i­lar dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects to keep in mind the impor­tance of build­ing ​“flex­i­bil­i­ty” into process­es with­in spe­cif­ic pro­gram busi­ness units, even if the entire orga­ni­za­tion isn’t under­tak­ing sim­i­lar work. 

“We did not have a self-ser­vice cus­tomer jour­ney in place before­hand,” McAdams said. ​“Hav­ing the C4C plat­form be part of our solu­tion gave us the flex­i­bil­i­ty to start that jour­ney of a dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence with the cus­tomer for this pro­gram by itself. The com­pa­ny is whol­ly focused on that dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence when it comes to man­ag­ing your gas and elec­tric, but this solu­tion gave our HPP pro­gram the flex­i­bil­i­ty to change the cus­tomer experience.”

DTE is now incor­po­rat­ing advanced code capa­bil­i­ties through this project, hav­ing built busi­ness log­ic into the SAP C4C Ser­vice Cloud solu­tion that vets claims and presents back-office admin­is­tra­tors with cer­tain con­di­tions con­sid­ered to be ​“red flags,” enabling them to effec­tive­ly adju­di­cate claims. 

Incre­men­tal devel­op­ment con­tin­ues at DTE, as McAdams and Sas­try con­sid­er the best ways to com­plete­ly lever­age and build upon their exten­sive SAP land­scape. The ​“hand-in-hand rela­tion­ship between the busi­ness exec­u­tives, archi­tects, and devel­op­ers” was essen­tial to the suc­cess of the project, McAdams said. ​“If you’re going to invest your mon­ey, you have to be will­ing to invest your peo­ple into build­ing what is nec­es­sary, and you have to have a process that sup­ports that.”

For a recap of the 2023 SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG con­fer­ence, read the ​“ASUG Util­i­ty Voice: Look­ing Back at SAP for Util­i­ties.”