We’ve all experienced the frustration of being placed endlessly on hold when calling a help desk to resolve a customer service issue. We all know how annoying it can be to attempt to resolve a billing error via website forms, and e-mails that feel like you’re simply ignored.

What’s even worse, however, is being on the other side of these interactions knowing that your customers’ frustrations are growing, and issues remain unresolved.

Customers expect high-quality service. In addition, as a utility you must also meet regulatory requirements related to customer engagement and satisfaction. This requires a significant investment in technology, data analytics and customer service resources.

Balancing the costs of meeting these expectations and requirements while maintaining profitability is a big challenge.

Now more than ever, providing a safe and reliable service to your customers needs to be an absolute priority.

How can you personalize your customer experience, in a highly regulated market, in order to gain a competitive advantage, increase revenue and reduce the cost to serve?

The good news is that you can prioritize the customer experiences that are essential to your revenue growth with technology in several ways:

Traditionally, a customer self-service portal served as an online location where customers could find information about accounts, look at their bills and consumption, manage their contact information, submit requests, and make payments.

Although this was a great start, customers have grown to expect more from their utility provider and their customer self-service portals. Having experienced that initial sense of empowerment, your customers now wish to manage their own payment plans and payment extensions, and more, without having to speak with your Customer Service Representatives (CSR).

By giving your customers access to their usage data and billing information through a secure, online portal, you can provide them more control over their account and improve transparency.

Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots can help you provide quick and efficient customer service, even outside of regular business hours.

The intelligent chatbot is perhaps the most important and visible AI technology you can adopt to improve your customer experience. An intelligent chatbot can use historical data to learn patterns of interaction to predict customer needs even before they get in touch.

That use of data means that customers can get responses faster. Furthermore, you can also redeploy CSRs to more stimulating and value-added work such as investigating more complex cases or interacting with your customers on social media. Promoting and protecting the brand voice and meeting your customers on their preferred platform will be part of the possibilities.

The data generated by the chatbot can also be used to guide your customers on other channels. For example, using customer experiences to push notifications on the customer portal towards individual customer groups around infrastructure, consumption savings and more.

Leveraging AI to move towards an omnichannel-centered customer experience allows you to process queries quicker and still be resource efficient.

The main philosophy behind this approach is to get to know your customers better and to leverage that knowledge to meet them on their preferred channel. This could mean replacing contact forms with chatbots but also using alerts and attractive portals to proactively inform customers of issues or offer personalized tips.

An important part of customer centricity is knowing the sentiment of your customer. By automatically scoring the sentiment of all incoming communication you can make sure your response is even more ‘personal’. E.g., if a customer with a positive contribution is unhappy, you want to direct them to a real person instead of trying to get this resolved via a chatbot or website form.

These examples are just scratching the surface of the possibilities to transform your customer experience, and to increase your NPS score. Our UMAX software solutions designed for utilities support all these functionalities, and more.

If you want to discuss how you can further improve your customer engagement, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.