How Utilities Are Adapting to the New Normal in the Realm of Customer Experience |
Posted: December 5, 2023 |
IntroductionThe power and utility industry is undergoing a major transformation just as other industries, especially since the pandemic triggered huge paradigm shifts in how everything and everyone operates. Today, customers have high expectations from their utility service providers and want a seamless customer experience, personalized approaches, streamlined customer services, enriched interactions, and highly impactful self-service options. Utility companies need to grab this opportunity to retain and grow their customer base, and to stay relevant in a fast-changing energy landscape. Utilities are at a unique inflection point where they can create a new competitive edge by adopting new technologies to improve the customer experience, make their services available through multiple touchpoints and enhance their interactions with their customers. The question that most of the utilities are grappling with is how to cope with rapid changes in market conditions while keeping customer delight as their primary priority. Following are some of the challenges utilities are facing currently:
What do Customers Want?Today’s customers are proactive, well-informed, and demanding. They expect instant service delivery and a seamless omnichannel experience, and easy contact through any platform of their choice, be it on the phone, via the web, social media, apps, or in person. Most utilities rely on legacy systems and are not flexible or nimble enough to enable high-quality customer engagement. The advent of new digital technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics are changing the landscape of the customer service framework in which the utilities operate. Other elements like dynamic pricing structures are being used by utilities to strengthen their engagement with customers, provide the customers with opportunities to reduce energy bills, improve customer retention, and also to better manage peak demand. Energy buying individuals and households specifically seek the following:
What are Utilities Doing?It is crystal clear what the power and utility companies need to do. They must provide high-quality customer experiences, reduce operating costs and discover new sources of revenue. As a precursor, utilities need to invest in strengthening their existing infrastructure and bringing in new technologies like smart meters, centralized operation centers, and distributed energy resources management systems. Utilities are also adopting cloud and advanced BI tools for real-time analysis of the huge quantities of data available to them. Some of their key focus areas are: System optimization and transformation:
Operations transformation:
Customer touchpoints:
Winning Customer Trust is ParamountTraditionally, the interactions between utilities and their customers are about providing them with the energy bill and collecting timely payments. This limited scope of engagement has made it difficult for utilities to transform and project themselves as trusted allies of their customers. To counter this, utilities today are becoming more customer-centric by introducing omnichannel touchpoints and self-service portals for customer interactions. In this context, data from smart meters can be analyzed to provide personalized suggestions and services. These initiatives can be greatly enhanced with a Customer Data Platform or CDP. Customer Data Platform is a collection of tools and applications that helps an organization to unify its various data sources, create a single golden customer record and a single version of the truth for all customer interactions, and make this data easily accessible to BI tools and personalization engines. A pre-built, customizable data platform comes with inherent advantages like faster deployment, optimized costs, and delivery of a powerful solution that exceeds the performance of grounds up, custom-built alternatives. Data gathered and compiled using customer data platforms helps companies to meet their customer expectations and serve up personalized experiences. Rysun’s digital solutions can help you create a unified omnichannel experience for your energy consumers Advantages of Implementing a Customer Data PlatformA unified CDP enables an organization to access valuable customer data scattered across different sources in a single, unified platform. Armed with this end-to-end knowledge of the customer, utility companies can provide highly-customized, quality services. CDP helps utilities in streamlining their customer service operations and increases the knowledge base of the service agents leading to increased first-time resolutions and shorter call durations, thereby increasing the efficiency of the call centers. Integrating their CRM platforms with the CDP workflows will create integrated and seamless business processes. Unified data platform, combined with automation, helps utilities to deliver the right offer to the right customer at the right time through the right channel. A customer data platform not only helps in creating greater customer satisfaction, and an omnichannel experience, it can also help achieve regulatory compliance by ensuring the data is compliant with the latest data privacy regulations and security standards. How do Customer Data Platforms strengthen Customer Experience for Power Utilities?
Rysun Value PropositionRysun (then KCS) partnered with a leading power EPC company in North America in their?digital transformation journey. We prepared a strategic plan for the company to remove gaps in the current processes to streamline operations. Rysun also provided insights on a technology-agnostic solution for improving its operational capabilities. In addition, we conducted a detailed organizational assessment and technical analysis to prepare the future roadmap for the company. In another instance, with the help of our?Customer Data Platform solution, one of our clients, who is one of the leading global manufacturer and retailer of furniture, was able to use big data technologies to process 80 million unique customer identities and get valuable insights for implementing their digital transformation roadmap. Rysun has also been a digital transformation advisor to an electricity generation, transmission, and distribution giant having a customer base of 2.4 million. We digitally enabled the customers of this power utility company, through advanced solutions to improve their customer experience and enable better engagement with the utility. The huge quantities of data generated through such digital solutions helped the company to refine its customer offerings and provide customized services to them. Rysun has strong and proven in-house capabilities to create and deploy customized Customer Data Platforms and solutions to help enterprises to fast-track their digital transformation journey and to create and deliver highly effective CX strategies to gain high customer satisfaction scores. The Way ForwardIn conclusion, utility companies need to digitally transform their operations and leverage the huge quantities of customer data they are generating. Utilities are rapidly transforming their systems, operations, and customer touchpoints to be flexible and capitalize on the data. The digital era makes customers the uncrowned monarchs and the Customer Data Platform can provide unequivocal vantage point to a customer-centric utility company.
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