Customer expectations evolve far more rapidly than most businesses can adapt to them. So says a 2020 study by NICE inContact focused on customer adoption of new digital experiences. Of course, none of the findings should surprise utility executives. We’ve had JD Powers “US Utility Digital Experience Study” available for 5 years reminding us of those changing tastes and trends. Unfortunately, the 5th edition of this important study demonstrated little progress.
Following the pandemic, virtually every major industry surged ahead with innovation for their digital customer experience (CX). Leading companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple defined digital CX innovation, which most industries adapted for their own websites and other digital environments. Customer Satisfaction with insurance industry digital experience (DX) climbed 11 points. Wealth Management DX scores climbed 12 points. During the same period, JD Power scores for CSAT for the utility customer experience declined four points year over year retreating to 2019 levels.
What’s the cause of this challenge? Customers continue to find utility digital experiences outdated with a lack of modern design, digital self-service, and omnichannel support.
Virtually every energy utility in the US now has a digital new energy start process to start or stop services, as well as digital bill presentment or portals for electronic bill and payment support. But customers clearly want more, and the industry has been slow to react. Only about one-third of large utilities offer a mobile app, a key challenge in an era of app-focused engagement by the upcoming generations raised on mobile devices. And few utility websites enable customers to perform true digital self-service beyond start/stop functions. Customers report trouble with more complex tasks like researching energy savings, updating their service, locating information about outages or leaks, and enrolling in special programs like demand response or time of use rate plans.
Kick-Starting Progress
Overcoming these challenges sound costly, such as building a mobile app or dramatically increasing customer self service portfolio. Without clear budget detail and development plans, it’s unlikely that a major capital project would get approved in this era of belt-tightening in the industry. From our perspective, though, much of the hype around these challenges gets overblown. A more iterative strategy of small focused improvements delivered over time solves much of the challenge. Â
What should utilities prioritize in order to restart or accelerate their progress towards a more modern utility CX? Â
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- Mobile First Design Refresh
- Slow and Steady Digital Transformation
- Hybrid Experience Support
Mobile First
When was the last time you visited your utility website from your personal smartphone? How did it look? Could you easily navigate the main page?  Was a search bar easy to find? Did the pages render clearly, crisply and quickly on the smaller screen? How did the images look? Could you click easily into functions to start service from a mobile device or click on phone numbers to connect to customer service quickly if you ran into any issues? If you answered yes to these questions, your utility excels among a small minority. Customers give low scores to most utility websites, especially on mobile. But it’s hugely important to be more mobile-focused.
Check the stats for your own site, but our experience shows that upwards of 70% of customer traffic to utility websites comes from a mobile device. If your website isn’t optimized first for a mobile user and Chrome browsers on iOS and Android viewing, most of your customers will immediately click away. Customers consider any website that doesn’t work on their phone to be outdated, and that out of date CX probably drives MORE calls to customer service just when your contact center budgets feel pressure to make cuts.Â
JD Power advocates for a dedicated mobile app, but we’re not fans of that investment for utilities. Mobile apps require a great deal more development and continuous innovation far beyond a website. Worse, most energy utility apps still fail to reach more than 40% adoption by customers and far fewer customers use them regularly, making the investment more costly to reach customers than a modest website update. Instead, refresh your website with a mobile-first perspective and deliver all of your basic functions that customers can view from their smartphone. A mobile-first design helps all of your customers immediately without the cost and delay of mobile app adoption rates. Making the website easier for customers to navigate and use on their smartphone can be accomplished relatively quickly and for a modest budget with a big impact to CSAT and the digital CX. Â
Slow and Steady Transformation
Software developers and CX designers often tell us that “perfect is the enemy of the good.” In other words, we should not let the lack of a perfect experience stop us from implementing helpful changes that reward customers’ expectations. But, that’s a tough sentiment for an enterprise that needs to build safe and efficient energy infrastructure at an industrial scale.
In the world of CX design, that philosophy instills the spirit of interactive design, building and implementing a steady flow of “good enough” experiences that over time lead to a great CX. Just think what your website could do today if the CX team released two new self-service features each year since COVID. Most utility websites would enable 6 or more self-service functions that would dramatically reduce call volume to customer service, result in fewer unnecessary truck rolls, or lead to higher CSAT.
Start with a list of the most common call types to customer service and examine transcripts. Build a list of the top five types of calls and three common questions or themes for each type. You just created a Product Roadmap for Digital Transformation that solves for your most common customer issues. Find three of the easiest elements on that list to build into an IVR or AVR, or change on the website so customers can find answers to their questions, and you will kick-start some digital transformation.
Maybe it’s an automated method for checking an overdue balance or making a payment by punching in a credit card number. Perhaps it’s a list of FAQ’s on the landing page of the website or during the start/stop process that helps customers complete the process online. Maybe customers need a link to start a claim for a repair and protection plan from the utility.  The contents of the priority list tells you exactly what customers most want to do themselves from their mobile device on the utility website. Now, just add a new feature or capability to the site to enable customers to help themselves, and within a year the utility’s website will have transformed. Don’t worry, though. Customers will always tell us what else to do.
Hybrid Experiences Rule
Operated assisted experiences continue to dominate the performance stats at virtually every utility, so plan to build hybrids for a long time to come. Customers may start from a self-service function then discover the need for more detail or a special question that only a trained customer service representative (CSR) can support. Planning for these complementary digital/live experiences delivers great value to customers. But, hybrid CX poses special challenges, so it may help to find a partner with technology and expertise to analyze your calls, collect customer insights and harmonize a hybrid approach that increases digital self-service but maintains a strong operator assisted experience to handle “fall-out” effectively. By analyzing those customer journeys, especially the fall-out scenarios, a good partner helps implement new capabilities to minimize more fall-out and improve self-service effectiveness.
Building hybrid experiences starts with deep analysis of the calls and issues presented in your DX and CX roadmaps. Processing calls for sentiment and customer insights helps identify the most likely scenarios for automation and self-service. Building a seamless experience on the website or within an IVR supports customers to handle issues on their own quickly and more easily than with a call to the customer service team. For example, a majority of calls to the Billing team may result in collection of a payment via credit card. The first step in self-service could be to automate payment through an IVR letting customers enter or speak their credit card information for processing. To make things even more secure and private for customers, a future evolution may include a prompt to “press 2 to receive a text with a link to make a payment,” which prevents any recording of the card detail or handle time on the IVR. Of course, if anything goes wrong with the payment journey, sending that customer to a trained CSR with detail of the customer issue makes for a quick and satisfying resolution.
I’m continually impressed with the progress utilities have made following the pandemic maintaining the safety of their workforce, support of their customers and continual improvement of their systems. Many of the articles in this special issue highlight the incredible investments the industry makes in digital transformation of generation, transmission and distribution responsibilities of a utility. Most utilities don’t employ large teams dedicated to the digital customer experience and the culture of a large industrial organization may not be optimal for the fast pace of digital innovation.  I hope that the information in this article helps highlight how easy it can be to make progress in that journey. Meeting customers where they want to engage means taking a mobile-first approach to your digital experience. You don’t need to invest in expensive mobile apps, though, which cost a lot and still struggle to achieve customer adoption. Refresh your website for the majority of customers who visit from their smartphone. Listen to calls and your CSRs to build a list of the top questions customers need help with, and take regular small steps to enhance your website and IVRs to solve for those needs. Customers will appreciate your efforts, and before you know it, you’ll be delivering the modern utility CX you and your customers deserve.