[BETA] Fortnightly

Text messaging promises benefits in customer service and bill-payment efficiencies. Utilities have been slow to take up the opportunities, but successes in other industries and among European utilities is opening the door to SMS transactions for American power companies.

 

A call for utilities to leave the marketing business.

Many of us on the front lines can identify with Stanley Klein's observation that, in terms of its implementation, the restructuring of the electric power industry is "fundamentally an information technology event."¹

Online services are popping up - for commodity trading, retail marketing and back-office billing. But is the Web right for every application?

A recent study by Connecticut-based META Group Inc. finds that while less than 5 percent of all utility commerce will be conducted electronically in 1999, 30 percent of customer service and retail bill payments will flow over the Internet by 2004. That prediction highlights a torrent of Web activity in recent months, from power trading online to retail solicitations to electronic customer billing and payment.