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Utility companies face increasing pressure to transform outdated business models into modern, customer-centric operations.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 that is removed from the lives of its customers. Utility providers must evolve into trusted energy advisors that customers can count on for personalised 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. Surveying consumers across diverse age groups, market types, and countries, the survey findings reveal several key CX transformation imperatives. These imperatives are orientated around service communications reliability, cost transparency, sustainability engagement, and digital experience personalisation.

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, with barely 4 in 10 impacted consumers reporting that they receive timely outage notifications.

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 personalised severity and restoration estimates to affected households. Doing so is CX table stakes, yet adoption of personalised 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 customised 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 prioritisation, tailored guidance empowering individual customers to shrink their environmental footprints remains negligible – just 3 in 10 survey respondents agreed that their utility supplier provides enough personalised recommendations.

By integrating housing data like roof solar capacity or leveraging smart meters, utility providers can make sustainability feel more achievable through hyper-personalised usage insights, tailored energy efficiency recommendations, and incentives for clean tech adoption and demand-response program enrollment.

4. Personalisation Deeply Lacking Across the Customer Journey

Worryingly, only a third of consumers indicated that their end-to-end journey feels personalised, 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 individualised 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' emerging 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 the analysis of IDC's Worldwide Energy Consumer Survey findings:

Energy Customer Interactions and Communication Channel Preferences

Do Energy Suppliers Around the World Provide Their Customers a Positive CX Along the Customer Journey?

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

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