Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) is freeing up staff time by providing a 24-hour online portal for customers to resolve their queries.

SSE's customer base increased from 4.5m to 8.5m between 2004 and 2008, driven by the company's extended online presence and services such as e-billing.

A rise in customer queries accompanied the growth, prompting the energy firm to seek additional methods of customer service, said John Evans, senior technical architect at SSE.

“Our email management system has enabled our customer service teams to cope with a dramatic increase in email volume," he said.

"But we wanted to give our customers more options and further reduce the strain on our customer service team by introducing web self service technology. We're aiming for 20 per cent e-mail deflection which will not only reduce support costs but shorten queues and improve the customer experience all round. "

The self service system is provided by US IT supplier eGain, which also provides SSE's email managment system.