Energize your customer relationship
It’s a whole new world for energy and utilities providers. Your customers are demanding more. It’s not enough for you to just process bills and collect fees. Customers expect an interactive relationship, one that includes real-time issue resolution and communication with field crews. That means breaking down the internal silos that prevent a complete view of customer information and using technology to create a culture that serves your customers.
From personalized service to smart, connected infrastructure, digital technology is redefining the nature of your business and transforming how you engage customers, manage assets and empower employees.
“We now have the necessary IT system in place to support our primary objective to provide our customers with flexible pricing plans that meet their needs along with first-class customer service. Fpzsgroup have helped to make this happen by ensuring the deployment was done on time and within budget.”
Optimize for changing utility customers needs
Find out how Fpzsgroup helps utility companies improve their customer engagement through self-service features like bill payment, start/stop notification and real time notification of service outages.
The Digital Utility
“Going digital” to transform how utilities serve customers and empower employees is a huge challenge…and opportunity.
Today’s utility providers are challenged to find new avenues for growth due to shifting demand, increasing costs, greater competition, less capital and more regulation. Delivering utility services is different now, even as the definition of a utility is changing. Utility leaders will have to change how they serve customers, as well as how they manage their assets and workforce. These changes will occur in great part through the application of new digital technologies and digitally enabled business processes.
Serving the digital customer in the new energy era.
The customer experience in utilities spans all customer touch points, from billing to outages to demand-response and energy efficiency programs. Yet, historically, utilities spend less than nine minutes a year directly interacting with their customers. The new, improved utilities customer experience will be about increased engagement, optimized interactions and new products and services. Furthermore, the ability to manage and analyze data from legacy systems, along with new data from the smart grid, means utilities will have more and better information about their customers, which they can use to address and improve core systems and processes. In turn, means they can achieve more proactive customer engagement and meet consumer desire for digital interaction.
Utilities are also seeking new and better ways to to build customer loyalty and lifetime value. They must work to solve traditional customer issues include high cost to serve, reactive customer service, low “one and done” completion, inaccurate billing, long handling time, slow stop-start service and outage management support to customers. They must also break down silos for customer data and segment buyers based on unique needs
The Way Forward: How to Become a Digital Insurer
Utilities should look to digital as a way to expand relationships with the customers, improve employee engagement and performance, and grow their business. Utilities need to:
1. Modernize core customer management systems
New data management and digital CRM solutions can help utilities get a unified customer view by integrating all their customer data so that agents can proactively recommend actions, products, and services to improve sales and service.
2. Expand digital presence with new tools and approaches
Using evolving digital channels effectively means proactively engaging customers during moments of truth (e.g., billing inquiries) to segment and market better, while also improving the quality and speed of issue resolution and reducing costs to serve.
3. Provide business capabilities to help customers understand and engage “smart”
Utilities must help customers adopt smart product and services by presenting smart grid data in an understandable format and by developing applications that help customers derive value from the smart grid – e.g., better energy and home management.
4. Improve use of analytics to understand customer behavior and offer new products
As customer adoption of “smart” grows, utilities can collect, integrate and analyze smart data to capture consumption trends and segment customers, integrate analysis into existing business processes and empower channels and partners.
5. Attract and engage the next- generation workforce with digital workplace tools
With utility employees retiring in large numbers, providers will have to search for new talent to fill the gap. That talent has grown up in a digitally- aware world, and that’s how they expect to operate, at work and play. A digitally advanced workplace will be critical to attracting the best talent.
Next steps
The current global disruption requires you to make changes – quickly. Fpzsgroup combines the business strategy, agile innovation and deep Microsoft technology expertise to help you rethink, so you can transform faster and smarter.
