Sunnyvale, Calif. – February 2, 2004 – Blue Pumpkin (Company
Profile, Past
Stories, Case
Studies), an industry leader in enterprise workforce optimization solutions, today announced signing on DTE Energy, a Detroit-based diversified energy company, as a new customer. Blue Pumpkin’s performance management technology and consulting recommendations have become central to DTE Energy’s strategy to recast itself as a customer-oriented organization to remain competitive in a new era of deregulation.
DTE Energy faced challenges more severe than most businesses in other industries. Its merger in 2001 and rising heating costs in the energy-hungry region caused a significant surge in customer questions and confusion. Further, recent deregulation opened customers to increasing choices, spurring more calls and placing more pressure on the company to remain competitive.
DTE Energy selected and implemented Blue Pumpkin Advisor Enterprise to rapidly elevate customer service performance by identifying the right areas to measure, pinpointing trouble-spots and managing to excellence. More than analysis, Advisor Enterprise enabled it to communicate expectations uniformly throughout the contact center and engage each employee in their work – winning the participation of a unionized workforce.
"Performance management is essential to not just our profitability but also our survival," explained David Johnson, customer care operations manager at DTE Energy. "To be competitive, every person in our organization must be empowered to perform at their highest level. Blue Pumpkin provides a platform for translating our strategies into action – galvanizing our people, improving our operations and giving us new insight into how well we are doing and where we can improve."
In addition to being a technology partner, Blue Pumpkin’s consultants audited DTE Energy’s customer care operations and made specific recommendations to maximize benefits and returns from their investments. Implementing industry best-practices and change management, the additional service ensures that processes are properly set up, key performance indicators (KPIs) measured are relevant, and deployment is tailored and successfully managed.
"As markets evolve, such as the energy industry, companies face a serious challenge to respond to those pressures in order to survive and become stronger," said Doron Aspitz, chairman and chief executive officer of Blue Pumpkin. "We’re seeing performance management become a significant competitive advantage as businesses respond to a recovering economy by increasing productivity and performance before adding many more jobs."
Blue Pumpkin Advisor Enterprise recently won the 2003 Product of the Year award in performance management from Customer Inter@ction Solutions, a leading industry publication. Another influential publication, Infoworld, had also rigorously tested the solution in their independent laboratories and assigned it the highest rating of "Deploy."
About Blue Pumpkin
Blue Pumpkin is the only workforce optimization vendor that that can deliver both the science and the art required to optimize the performance of a company’s most valuable asset – its people. Addressing critical business challenges with both innovative technology – the science – and best-practices professional services – the art – we help our customers align performance measurements with business goals, develop strategic staffing plans, deploy resources, evaluate the results, and implement on-going improvements. Blue Pumpkin solutions deliver proven value to more than 1,000 organizations worldwide such as AOL Time Warner, AT&T, eBay, E*TRADE, Federal Express, JetBlue, Mercedes-Benz and Visa. www.bluepumpkin.com.
# # #
© 2004 Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Blue Pumpkin and the Blue Pumpkin logo are registered trademarks of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
email this article