The modern utility is actively rethinking how it interacts with customers, a process that’s long overdue but is bringing with it immense benefits for the power providers and their consumers alike. Especially in the advent of the digitalization of many aspects of the utility industry, the opportunities to engage and compel customers is everchanging.
Energy Central’s Network of Experts is a great area to see some of the top voices who are guiding, reacting to, and even creating these changes, and the intersection of the digital opportunities with the customer-facing mindset is no more evident than it is with our Expert Member, Mark Wilkinson, the SVP of Products at ibex Digital.
Mark joined our Network of Experts in the Customer Care Community more than a year ago (see our first interview with him here), but given how quickly and thoroughly this sector continues to evolve, we found that was more than enough time to wait to bring him back for an interview and see what trends he’s seeing and the advice he has for our utility readers.
Keep reading to see our conversation and be sure to leave him any questions or comments at the end of the article to keep that dialogue going!
Matt Chester: Thanks for joining us again for a follow up interview Mark, and we’re excited to continue to have you as one of our experts. Can you share a bit more about what you’ve been up to since our initial interview in the summer of 2021?
Mark Wilkinson: It’s been a busy year and a half, hasn’t it? Despite COVID, or perhaps because of it, we’ve accelerated many of our digital transformation and marketplace solutions. Customers really expected more digital interaction and self-service on their utilities’ websites. We’ve onboarded new programs for some of our biggest clients, FirstEnergy, FPL, and PG&E, as well as launched new categories for our marketplace solution. I’m very excited to have actually been on site with our partners and clients for different events lately including CS Week, EMACS, Utility2030’s annual conference, and the Beyond the Meter Working Group last week, so that’s been a lot of fun and a real feeling of return to normal.
MC: During our last interview, Mark, you highlighted the landscape of COVID and navigating those challenges as being atop your list when working with utilities. What is the major landscape-setting environment like today: power prices, grid reliability issues, something else?
MW: We’re talking a lot with our utility partners about what to expect for their customers next year. Power prices dominate the news and lead to a lot of scams. I talk a lot about rooftop solar with our utility partners lately. One way or the other, electric utilities are going to deal with rooftop solar because customers have questions. If utilities don’t address them, then private industry will, and it won’t always be in a positive way. Like it or not, rooftop solar sales remain largely unregulated and get sold as a way to reduce household electric bills. Utilities will get the questions if customers don’t see the savings post-installation or asked about repair and maintenance of a solar system if customers get orphaned when manufacturers or installers go out of business. Residential EV charging stations face some of the same issues, so we want to help our utility clients take a position and get ahead of the curve so that they can lead their customers rather than pick up the pieces of other groups fallout.
MC: We love to talk about solutions on Energy Central, both proven ones and innovative new ones. Is there a tool coming down the pipeline that you think will enable you to transform what utilities can do in the years to come?
MW: We haven’t talked much about this yet, but we are doing a soft launch of a new Voice of the Customer Solution customized specifically for utility partners. Ibex has been a major solution provider in the automotive space for a long time with an enterprise platform doing over 20 million voice of the customer surveys every year. We tend to work with highly regulated industries and automotive has a lot of sensitivity to CSAT and JD Power, so the solution was really well positioned to support utilities. I wanted to adjust the delivery model so that a utility could get all of the capability of an enterprise solution like survey design, advanced questions and responses, out of the box “closed loop” response and escalations, and amazing dashboards, but delivered more affordably and scaled for a mid-sized utility. The demos were very effective at the show, and our beta programs with our current clients have been solid, so we’re going to launch this year. It’s “CX as a Service” for providing real time telemetry across the entire utility customer lifecycle, but for just a few cents per household annually and built to fit into existing customer operations teams.
MC: How do you see the utility sector evolving in ways that perhaps utility leaders you work with are slow to recognize? What are going to be some of the trends that will change the sector that you think we need to be paying more attention to?
MW: I’d like to see the industry tackle customer centricity in a more metric driven way in years to come. I see progress in the CX movements and how we survey for CX Maturity in places like Utility 2030 and the surveys Jaime has done at DEFG and E Source in terms of customer perception. I’d like to see a scorecard on utilities that includes how VoC and customer data influences decision making, how many utilities have a centralized Chief Customer Officer reporting to the CEO or Board, or how utilities measure the health of their relationship with their customers. It’s a long road, and frankly no industry does it perfectly, but the new generation of utility leaders certainly seems to be more interested in the topic.
MC: Can you share a bit about what you’ve learned from the Energy Central community since being an expert and how you hope to see your engagement with the community and its members evolve in the coming months?
MW: I love the Energy Central community, especially the diversity of the contributors’ expertise and viewpoints. It’s still my first stop in the morning to catch up on news in the industry. I like to browse other groups to keep up with our partners and clients, especially the digital utility area, to learn about new developments.
We’re going to be digging deeper into regulatory issues as they impact our clients and markets this year, especially as the Inflation Reduction Act implications and various FERC findings get sorted out, and I’ll be using my Energy Central network to tap their expertise, as it’s a new area for us.
MC: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know that you didn’t get a chance to touch upon above?
MW: For me, it’s a bit of a “first things first” perspective, and I think things always begin with the customer. I’m passionate about finding a commonsense path for talking with utilities and the vendor community about how to solve customer challenges, so always interested in meeting new members of the community who want to shape that message and bring a new approach.
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Thanks to Mark Wilkinson for joining me for this interview and for continuing to be one of our valued Experts on Energy Central. You can trust that Mark will be available for you to reach out and connect, ask questions, and more as an Energy Central member, so be sure to engage him when you see him across the platform.
The other expert interviews that we’ve completed in this series can be read here, and if you are interested in becoming an expert then you can reach out to me or you can apply here.