CEO and Founder at Smart Energy Water. Connecting People with Energy and Water Providers.
It’s a retail world these days — one that is completely centered around the customer’s needs. While this CX phenomenon is somewhat new for the utility industry, we have accepted it. Utilities that have taken years to build reliability and win customers’ trust now want to win over customers with their new-age services.
Amid the overwhelming challenges of Covid-19, customer experience has become more important than ever. Reliability now marries care and convenience. Hand in hand with this perspective, two themes have emerged that can help utilities reframe their customer care initiatives and elevate their CX:
1. Focus On Empathy
As billions retreated into isolation, utilities had to meet existing customer needs and deliver services with empathy, care and concern. Many leading energy providers introduced initiatives for low-income and vulnerable communities, including payment relief and credit support.
The pandemic has also increased consumer preference for extra information, guidance and support from their utilities. This empathy must extend to the field workforce, helping them deliver essential services in a remote, distributed work environment.
2. Meet Customers Where They Are
Customers are moving online, compelling utilities to migrate their customer interactions to digital channels. Utilities are now building contactless operations, leveraging virtual assistants, chatbots and social media for customer query redresses.
Recent events underscored the importance of building agile capabilities by accelerating time to market for innovations. Utilities had to rapidly deploy new services while addressing customers’ transactional and sustainability objectives.
The CX Innovation Catalyst
Utilities recognize the strategic role of technology as a critical component beyond a source of cost efficiencies. Many companies are turning to new digital technologies to build excellent customer relationships and help achieve net-zero goals. Let’s look at a few innovative technologies that organizations can adopt for this purpose:
• Integrated digital platforms can deliver a data-driven, personalized customer experience in real time, enabled by AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning) and IoT (internet of things) devices. Smart homes, EVs, buildings and more are being managed by these platforms.
• Virtual assistants (VA) and chatbots can help users manage energy and water consumption and optimization by cost, time of use and sustainable attributes — through automated, personalized suggestions that combine consumer habits and external data.
• Peer-to-peer transactions can offer capabilities to manage, trade, hedge and optimize energy capabilities, meeting the growing demand of customers and communities in real time.
• Energy marketplaces and their personalized incentives encourage demand for energy and water-saving products, providing customized value-added programs and related products based on customer purchase history.
• Augmenting social media and voice chats can provide seamless customer engagement, leveraging analytical insights on channels based on customer preferences.
Addressing Conservation And Sustainability
Keeping a real-time pulse on changing consumer preferences and rapidly innovating to redesign user journeys is critical. Delivering hyper-personalized, omnichannel digital experiences is becoming a priority for all energy and water companies hoping to anticipate customer needs and wants for superior cost savings, resource conservation and customer empowerment.
The rise of customer consciousness toward conserving energy and water is leading utilities to build systemic intelligence using IoT, AI, ML and other analytics solutions. A tremendous opportunity exists here for energy and water utilities hoping to leverage their community-focused mission and take a more significant leadership role in advancing the tenets of sustainability. Customers are also making more autonomous energy-water choices. Utilities are increasingly looking at providing customers with greater control through real-time monitoring of energy and water consumption.
The three D’s — digitization, decentralization and decarbonization — are popular initiatives for the utilities industry. Within these trends, I’m excited to see the following:
• DER Management Solutions: These are energy-as-a-service platforms that play the role of aggregators for customers and vendors. For example, utilities could aggregate residential thermostats and EV batteries to enable consumer participation in wholesale markets.
• Customer Empowerment: Utilities are perfecting their advisory capabilities to help customers with their conservation, decarbonization and electrification decisions, engaging them proactively and offering them intelligent insights into savings and benefits, along with personalized solutions.
• Digital Marketplaces: Utilities must provide customers with services beyond their normal offerings, driving better customer engagement and transforming their relationship with customers by creating more touchpoints on the customers’ journey to enable the energy services they require.
• Purpose-Driven Brands: The strongest players in the industry are creating new offerings around e-mobility, smart homes, energy and water conservation, solar power, community energy and more. This will help them facilitate initiatives for smart cities, create smart citizens and transform themselves into smart utilities.
In 10 years, we will see a substantially transformed industry, but to reach that stage, there are also clear milestones on the journey ahead. When introducing new offerings and business models, energy and water providers can start small with pilot projects and bring along their industrial and technology collaborators and partners to help pave the way for an intelligent utility ecosystem. Utilities will need to embrace the increasing demands and expectations of customers and unleash the capabilities of AI, IoT, NLP (natural language processing) and ML technologies, keeping the customer at the center of their business operations.
Utility leaders that use customer care as their “North Star” to redefine their operating models can fully realize the potential of emerging technology, grow their revenue, increase their stakeholder value, support green initiatives and net-zero ambitions and differentiate their customer experience.
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