Reimagining the Utility-Consumer Relationship
Illuminating the Utility Consumer Point-of-View
Utility companies face increasing pressure to transform outdated business models into modern, customer-centric operations. This necessitates a reimagining of the traditional role as a commodity supplier or rate collector that is removed from the lives of its customers. 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 and journey, including points of strength and weakness. Several CX transformation imperatives emerge upon analysis of the survey responses from consumers across diverse age groups, market types, and countries. These imperatives are orientated around service communications reliability, cost transparency, sustainability engagement, and digital experience personalization.
1. Outage Notification Reliability Lags in Competitive Markets
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 expensive and challenging, but event-driven customer communications present an opportunity to quickly improve outage responsiveness and awareness. Utilities must leverage digital channels, such as SMS and text messaging, to push personalized severity and restoration estimates to affected households. Doing so is CX 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 that 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) solutions, utility providers can deliver interactive digital bills featuring customized usage breakdowns and dynamic drill-down charts. In doing so, utilities 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, utility providers can make sustainability feel more achievable through hyper-personalized usage insights, tailored energy efficiency recommendations, and incentives for clean tech adoption and demand-response program enrollment.
4. Personalization 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 Expectations with Utility CX Transformation
To help you align your operational transformation with customers' wants and needs, we're offering complimentary access to two parts of IDC's "Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey Discovery Series," which share key analysis of IDC's Energy Consumer Survey.
Download for expert analysis of IDC's Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey findings:
Energy Customer Interactions and Communication Channel Preferences
Sources:
"Energy Customer Interactions and Communication Channel Preferences: Part 2 of the 2022 Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey Discovery Series,” By: Gaia Gallotti & Daniele Arenga, January 2023, IDC Survey, Doc # US49142522
“Do Energy Suppliers Around the World Provide Their Customers a Positive CX Along the Customer Journey? Part 5 of the 2022 Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey Discovery Series,” By: Gaia Gallotti, April 2023, IDC Survey, Doc # EUR150512923
