Avertra Corp.
Spearheading the Utility Industry Through its Evolution
Avertra Corp.

Matt Daniels, Director of Products, Avertra Corp.Matt Daniels, Director of Products
With technological advances and data storage being converted to cloud-based systems, utility companies are striving hard to be proactive instead of reactive during this transitional period. To be able to interact with the grid and provide services to their customers even more efficiently, utility companies are continuing to invest in updating how they process data, train their employees, and produce their product. Offering a future-proof platform across organizations’ Utility Operations & Customer Engagement Lifecycle is Herndon, VA-based Averta. From its founding in 2007, Avertra has been a global technology development and consulting company, servicing North America and several countries throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Inside Avertra, the multinational utility tech company, the name of the game is “customer delightfulness.” Avertra’s Director of Delivery, Melanie Case says, “For us, within our team and all our products, the goal is to increase the productivity level of our clients and help them in taking their customers from being just satisfied to completely excited.”

Avertra’s Products deliver cutting-edge and forward-looking process innovation that is optimized specifically for the Utility Industry. MiAgent’s intuitive application design, workflow builder, and built-in third-party integration simplifies complex procedures and keeps customer service agents in a single wizard or pop-up for process execution. This gives a highly-skilled agent a frictionless tool to achieve higher levels of peak performance. At the same time, the Customer and Location Dashboards that have quick action capability help agencies become more efficient and accurate call-handlers, regardless of their skill level.

Since customers often start with lower levels of initial investment and build a foundational integration platform, Avertra provides flexible and pragmatic methods for utilities to take the first step and then stand a chance to branch out to larger scales of digital transformation.

Avertra’s products are designed to cover all aspects of customer engagement through multifarious means


Recognizing that the enterprise landscape of each utility is different, the company provides strategies, and a flexible integration platform that works with the landscape businesses have today.

Avertra begins its approach by recognizing the existing technology that utility companies have and works with them to expand their stack. For utility companies that already have a contact center, Avertra’s cloud-based call center application, MiAgent, can be implemented and made to run in parallel with an existing CRM system. Avertra’s utility customers have the option of buying individual modules or the entire product suite. Centered on integration, MiAgent is built on a platform-agnostic technology stack to avoid vendor lock-in and enable handshakes between systems of record and modules available in the MiUtility Platform. An integral aspect of MiAgent is its call center automation functionality that allows efficient means of working through complex processes using an intuitive interface. This allows the agent to focus on engaging the customer, instead of struggling through call scripts and a myriad of screens, systems, and data.

Focusing primarily on automating business logic to make the contact center smarter, MiAgent runs creative workflows that support instant caller identification and customer account verification. When an agent takes the call, his screen is populated with complete information about the caller/ customer, including location, bill payment, and consumption details. With smaller learning curves, customer service agents can serve more consumers while ensuring better levels of customer satisfaction. “When we demonstrate the capabilities of the product to our clients, we constantly met with comments such as ‘the time your products save us is immense’ and ‘this is going to make our job easier,’” evinces Melanie. The positive feedback Avertra often receives from utility key stakeholders is the litmus test that gauges the performance of their product for every implementation they undertake.

Avertra’s product tree is the total of concerns voiced by utility clients as well as its employees. Avertra’s products are designed to cover all aspects of customer engagement through various means.

With well-defined microservices, utilities can have easy interconnectivity between Avertra modules such as MiIVR, MiRead, and MiFieldServices, and various third-party applications. For instance, MiRead with features like GPS-enabled routing and geo-tagging takes meter-reading to a whole new level of efficiency. When tied together with the MiUtility Platform, MiRead provides meter readers with real-time routing information that allows them to complete their regular meter read cycle faster.

Along with the MiFieldServices module—Avertra’s workforce management portal—a utility can gain total visibility into a field technician’s workday. The tool allows automatic work order scheduling, sequencing, and routing according to workload, technician availability, and other geographical factors.

Through every single utility project, Avertra is adding a feather to its hat of ‘customer delightfulness.’ The company also takes in custom requests that clients put forward at any phase of the utility value chain. A few years back, one of Avertra’s clients was undergoing a service expansion initiative. The firm wanted an application to help capture the information of potential customers who want service extended to their home or area. Avertra implemented the MiLine request for that utility company. This application satisfied their initial requirements and went above and beyond by enabling the service to have the capability to automate the creation of these new customers in their backend system. Additionally, MiLine could be used to automate the entire new construction process—from the moment a builder submits an intent for construction of a new property, or even an entire development, all the way to the service becoming operational at that location.

With increasing levels of process automation to fuel this journey, Avertra’s to-do list is chockfull of plans to utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence to create advanced situational awareness in product line features. The company is striving toward its vision of ensuring its customers have the best possible products, and given the team’s strategies and prowess, Avertra will be a game-changer in the utility space.

- Royce DSouza
    September 21, 2017