Reimagining the Utility-Consumer Relationship
Utility companies face increasing pressure to transform outdated business models into modern, customer-centric operations. This necessitates a shift from the traditional role of impersonal commodity supplier. Utility providers must evolve into trusted energy advisors that customers can count on for personalized guidance and support as they navigate the changing energy landscape.
But how well do utility providers understand evolving customer expectations? Where are utilities successfully delivering valuable and sustainable services — and where do shortcomings exist? IDC Energy Insights conducted a worldwide energy consumer survey of 1,730 energy consumers that unveils the customer's point of view on the utility customer experience, including points of strength and weakness. Upon analysis of the insights collected from energy consumers across different groups, market types, and countries, several key action items emerge. These action items are orientated around communications reliability, cost transparency, sustainability engagement, and digital experience personalization.
1. Outage Notifications Reliability Needs Improvement
Maintaining consistent energy and gas flows is mission-critical. Survey results indicate that regulated utilities score reasonably well in terms of alerting customers to unplanned service interruptions. However, competitive market suppliers dramatically underperform here – barely 4 in 10 impacted consumers receive timely outage notifications today.
Restoring infrastructure reliability is challenging, but customer communications present an opportunity to quickly improve responsiveness during outages and required maintenance. Utilities must leverage digital channels, such as SMS and text messaging, to push personalized severity and restoration estimates to affected households. Doing so is table stakes, yet adoption of personalized mobile notifications lags.
2. Bills Need to be Simplified and Better Illustrate Cost Drivers
Over 75% of customers desire simplified bills that clarify cost drivers and make monitoring monthly charges easier, yet just half believe their supplier accomplishes this presently.
This transparency gap sows confusion, constraining budgeting and inflating customer service inquiries. By integrating billing and analytics systems with Customer Communications Management (CCM) software, providers can provide interactive digital bills featuring customized usage breakdowns and dynamic drill-down charts. In doing so, utility providers can simultaneously boost literacy and reduce service costs.
3. Customers Want to be Engaged in the Green Energy Agenda
Despite climate action prioritization, tailored guidance empowering individual customers to shrink their environmental footprints remains negligible – just 3 in 10 survey respondents agreed that their utility provides enough personalized recommendations.
By integrating housing data like roof solar capacity or leveraging smart meters, utilities can make sustainability feel far more achievable through hyper-personalized usage insights, cost-savings and energy efficiency program recommendations, and incentives for clean tech adoption.
4. Personalization is Deeply Lacking Across the Customer Journey
Worryingly, only a third of consumers indicated that their end-to-end journey feels personalized, with even fewer agreeing that suppliers effectively tailor digital recommendations to their households. Here, too, the prevailing experience remains one-size-fits-all.
Unless utilities reimagine digital ecosystems to provide individualized guidance and resources matching distinct customer needs, they risk losing relevance as rising competitors deliver superior engagement.
Aligning Customer Expectations with Utility CX Transformation
To help you align your operational transformation with utility customers' wants and needs, we're offering complimentary access to two parts of IDC's "Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey Discovery Series," which shares key findings and analysis of IDC's Energy Consumer Survey.
Download now for worldwide energy consumer survey insights, analysis, and trends:
Energy Customer Interactions and Communication Channel Preferences
