The energy industry is evolving at a faster rate than ever before. Demands come from a desire to move to more sustainable sources of energy, changing expectations from our customers and the need to spend resources on innovation to understand what is possible. Safety and reliability are a base expectation but also require constant investment.  Making this even more complicated is trying to help people understand what more sustainable sources look like, what the cost of digital personalized experiences means to our customers and how does that correlate to the value and how in a regulated environment do we resource innovation to better understand ways to do things. Someone once told me that if you asked people back in the 1800’s what they needed they would have told you a faster horse when what have been better was a car!  So as a professional in the industry how to we manage all of this?
Let me start with sustainability. There are choices and people are hearing about a variety of goals from politicians, their local energy and water companies, activists and their kids from school. How are we as an industry preparing our customers to be aware of those options and how they can help do their part? Many times it is challenging to understand what that means to the average consumer and their role in the broader objectives. Why should they care? Why does one choice make sense over another?
For many years, the bulk of investments went into the physical assets to maintain the systems providing the safe and reliable service that is expected. There was little resources made available to enhance  customer interactions. Now, due to customers experiencing effortless transactions in their daily lives interacting with other companies, they expect us to offer the same options. Giving them transparency and control over their usage and an effortless experience to interact with us. This customer centric approach needs to be driven by the voice of the customer. This means having the right mechanisms to capture that valuable feedback. Entering into a period of time where paper payment processing costs are escalating due to decreased demand, we must also continue to serve the breadth of our communities with all options.  Then add the pandemic which forces the industry to find digital answers long before we had anticipated. Changing our approach to the customer experience is costly and takes investment as well. How much is it worth to our customers?
Last but not least at all is innovation, how do we keep looking forward and make sure that we are responding to the needs for the faster horse but at the same time looking for the opportunity to provide the car? Do we have resources dedicated to this and how do we do this in a regulated environment? For those of us driving transformation, how do we do this? How do we set priorities? How do we keep from getting caught up in technology and losing sight of the people that we serve being the employees and the customers? How do we ensure that the environment is ready for change, or continued evolution.