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It’s been five years since the concept of “customer engagement” swept through the utility industry. Yet even today, there’s a lot of ambiguity about what successful engagement actually looks like.
The one point of consensus is that utilities aren’t engaging their customers enough. Accenture famously found that the average home spends just nine minutes a year interacting with their energy provider.
The knee-jerk response has simply been to create new customer touchpoints. But that approach may be misguided. As one CCO at a leading utility noted recently, “I don’t always want my customers engaging with me.” Customers probably feel the same way.
A more nuanced approach to customer engagement prioritizes quality over quantity. Rather than blasting homes and businesses with wave after wave of generic communications, leading utilities are selectively enriching the customer experience at critical points in the customer lifecycle — delivering a higher level of service at the moments customers care about most.
We call these the Moments that Matter. And in a new white paper, Opower explains why they represent utilities' best opportunity to drive their most important business outcomes, from improved customer satisfaction, to lower cost to serve, to greater cross-promotion of new services.
The moments — 12 in all — are based on deep, cross-disciplinary research from Opower’s Consumer Insights team, including in-depth interviews with utility CCOs, call center data from 15 utilities, and survey data from more than 7,000 customers in seven countries.
The end result: a framework that distils the concept of customer engagement into discrete, actionable investments that can unlock the value embedded within a utility’s customer base.
You can get the full scoop in Opower's new white paper, which presents findings from North America. (Work in EMEA or APAC? Stay tuned for regionally specific research in the coming weeks.) You’ll also find clear answers to a series of vital questions:
- What is the state of the utility-customer relationship in 2015?
- What do customers care about most? Service? Reliability? Value?
- Which customer-facing investments can deliver the biggest returns?
- What experiences cause customers the most anxiety?
- What do customers think their utilities are doing well?
- Where do customers think their utilities are falling short?
- What’s the business case for improving the customer experience?
Download Opower's full white paper on the Moments that Matter