The cost-of-living crisis: how utilities can better support their customers and improve customer service
Today, utilities are faced with an increasing number of customers who struggle to pay their energy or water bill. Customers are experiencing the biggest increase in the cost of living for a generation, pressuring household budgets. As winter approaches, another increase in the energy price cap means more substantial price rises.
In your quest to deliver the best customer experience, now more than ever, you must adopt a proactive, digital approach to managing customers in debt.
How can innovation help?
Currently, customers tend to approach you when they first experience difficulty paying or following a non-payment. In both cases, most utilities are reactive to the issue. Moreover, your customer service advisers are overwhelmed by interactions with unhappy, stressed customers, which affects their motivation and mental wellbeing.
That is why you must conduct a proactive analysis of your customer base. Drawing on internal and external data, and historic and forecasting data, your utility can gain insight to assess financial impacts and to help your customer adjust consumption behavior, thus reducing their invoice. By connecting data from smart meters with the customer information system (CIS), you can personalize customer insights and provide tailor-made advice. Digital integration and automation also enable consistent and reliable debt journeys with easier reporting.
But is this possible when you have a dated legacy CIS solution?
It depends.
If your utility has a dated CIS solution, it is most probably relatively inflexible. These systems do not facilitate a proactive approach to customer billing. If that’s the case, now is the time to initiate a replacement or upgrade of your CIS solution to a modern platform. This ensures the customer experience remains a central focus, enabling a proactive approach to managing customers experiencing financial hardship. Additionally, proactive communication – also enabled by a modern CIS solution – is among the most effective ways to reduce strain on your customer service advisers. This improved digital technology permits them to concentrate on high-value tasks, which helps decrease employee turnover by preventing burnout.
As the implementation of these modern platforms does not happen overnight, there is also a short-term, quick-win approach to consider: the use of algorithms that interact with the existing billing engine and your customer relationship management (CRM) system. These enable you to proactively analyze and improve residential debt management and support. This approach draws core data from the main billing system. Results can be quickly realized using new technologies such as AI.
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