Opower is a cloud-based company best known for its demand management and response tools. But the company's recent foray into customer care — it launched a new platform aimed at helping utilities reduce billing calls — helps illustrates how radically the industry has changed and where opportunity now resides for utilities.
Simply put, evolving technologies and power markets have given customers more options and control. And at the same time, expectations for customer interface are going up thanks to companies like Amazon and Uber. Utilities, which have been late adopters to hyper-vigilent customer service and interfaces, must now focus on boosting those offerings.
“Technology is changing the energy and utility marketplace. Customers could have more choices in the future, and I think we all expect that they will, whether you're thinking about batteries ... or you're thinking about solar or some other technology we don't even know about today,” said Jason Teller, vice president of customer solutions at Puget Sound Energy (PSE), a utility in Northwest Washington state with more than a million electric customers.
PSE has been a long-time customer of Opower, partnering with the company about eight years ago. While their work has traditionally been done on the energy efficiency and demand management side, Teller said the changing energy space led the utility to evaluate its customer care needs.
“Bottom line, the reason why the customer experience is important is because we want to be the trusted energy partner of choice no matter what the customer's energy need is down the line,” Teller said.
According to Opower, utilities globally spend $30 billion a year on customer operations, with the largest expenditures in billing and call center operations. But despite that investment, research shows that utilities see much room for improvement in customer interactions. And as the grid becomes more advanced and communications options evolve, call centers are the most expensive way a customer can contact the utility. That means utilities stand to save significant money if they can move customer contacts to mobile devices or onto the web – where customers increasingly want to do business anyway.
Opower’s first customer care offering, Billing Suite, focuses on reducing high bill call volume and call center handle time, the company said. In early tests, the company said clients using these products have reduced billing related calls by up to 19%.
Opower works with 95 utilities, giving it access to enormous amounts of data which can be used to target messaging and offerings. The company has 350 billion meter reads stored, according to Josh Lich, associate director of solutions marketing, allowing it intense insight into how customers are using power and interacting with their utilities.
“Utilities have a new set of challenges,” Lich said. “They're seeing things like flattening demand and new competition in the form of distributed generation, or even the Google Nests of the world. And increasing regulation focused on emissions. And so what all of these regulations and changes and new competition are doing, is putting for the utilities the customer as a deeper focus.”
A new focus on customers
Throughout the last year, Lich said he has witnessed a renewed focus on customers in the utility industry as the new technologies give customers greater control.
“They're requiring utilities to transform from the monopoly provider to the provider of choice,” Lich said. “It's a new set of priorities for utilities, focusing on building loyalty and getting customers to actually want to be their customers.”
In fact, utility executives identify the customer relationship as their second largest future business opportunity (distributed resources were first), according to a recent survey of the industry. At the same time, more than 40% said their power demand has not returned to historical highs. Those figures succinctly illustrate the problem facing power providers: how to take customer care, which has traditionally been tied to pain points like outages and billing, and turn it into an asset.
Rates, reliability no longer enough to compete
While reliability and rates are the areas where utilities have typically focused, no longer is that sufficient.
Sacramento Municipal Utility District recently chose Opower for a multi-year partnership to deliver personalized communications across residential, commercial, and industrial customers. SMUD is replacing a set of existing systems with the Opower platform in an effort to drive energy efficiency savings and to improve customer experience.
"Anticipating and delivering on customer expectations is a key business objective for us," said Nicole Howard, chief customer officer for SMUD. "In the utility space, whether they are residential energy users, small business customers or very large industrial accounts, customers expect an easy, no-fuss solution to achieve their energy-saving and money-saving goals."
Opower will deliver an integrated web portal across all of SMUD's nearly 625,000 residential and commercial customers, enabling them to gain personalized insights into their energy usage
Among the offerings in Opower's new “Billing Suite” are high bill alerts that let customers know when they are trending above their typical usage, and bill notifications that provide context about the main drivers of their energy use. The notifications also give utilities an opportunity to market relevant programs and services. A “Billing Advisor” product arms utility call center reps with personalized insights aimed at increasing customer satisfaction and lower average call times.
A coming of age: Utilities grow into the era of customer servce
“It's kind of a coming to age. Utilities are looking around and they're seeing these trends,” said Opower's Lich. “They're also seeing telecommunications providers and banks move very quickly to develop customer loyalty. The combination of these utility-focused factors and expectations from customers dealing with a variety of other service providers are really making utilities rethink their model and how important customers are to them.”
Puget Sound, which serves customers in the tech-heavy Seattle area, understands this need. The city is home to a slew of internet-based businesses with a focus on customer service. That means the utility, which may not face direct competition from an Amazon or Expedia or Nordstrom, does feel pressure from their focus on customer service.
For Teller, who has a background in the tech industry, it comes down to this: Using that customer service to build trust. Which in turn opens up opportunities for the utility.
The tech industry is “a world that traditionally has been more involved and faster moving, where you bring the right thing to market or your competition will do it,” Teller said. “There are some companies with really great customer service out here. They use tech pervasively to move their businesses forward.”
“When you start to think: Would the customer give any of those companies the benefit of the doubt as they launch a new product or service, the answer is probably 'Yes.'”
