Aclara ENERGYprism Customer-Care Suite Expands to Include Water Customers

WELLESLEY, Mass., Jan. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- One of the utility industry's leading customer-care solutions for managing energy usage, ENERGYprism(R) from Aclara(R), has extended its online self-service tools and other key features to support water utilities and their customers. ENERGYprism promotes water conservation efforts and improves customer service by allowing water customers to access and analyze bills online as well as visually track usage.

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A new feature of ENERGYprism also lets customers see the costs of water usage at specific intervals, which helps customers to understand how they use water.  If customers can see how much they are spending on water at specific times of the day, they can make informed decisions about how to better manage resources.

Additionally, application enhancements provide customer-service representatives with immediate access to daily and hourly water usage as well as on-demand reads that allow them to better resolve inquiries while on the telephone with the customer.

The new water features of ENERGYprism are especially useful to combination utilities because water usage data can be integrated into the existing customer dashboard and displayed along with energy use. Customers can see how their water use compares to that of others, contrast usage year-over-year, and evaluate hourly usage data. The "My Appliance House" feature of ENERGYprism now displays how much water is used by specific appliances in addition to showing energy usage. Customers also can complete "what-if" analyses to determine how a change in the way they use water will affect their bills.

The ENERGYprism customer-care solutions are widely used in industry, with 65 utilities in North America now employing all or part of the software suite. Six of the top ten electric and gas utility web sites, as well as the utility benchmarked as number one in the recently published E Source 2009 Review of North American Electric and Gas Company Web Site employ ENERGYprism.

About Aclara

The Aclara(R) brand represents the industry's leading Intelligent Infrastructure(TM) technologies for providing device networking, data-value management, and customer communications to water, gas, and electric utilities globally. Over 500 utilities in nine countries rely on proven Aclara solutions to connect with their customers. Aclara is part of the Utility Solutions Group of ESCO Technologies Inc. (NYSE: ESE), St. Louis. Create Your Intelligent Infrastructure(TM) www.Aclara.com.

SOURCE Aclara