Future-Proofing Your Energy & Utilities Business: The Role of Contact Centers

The challenges facing energy and utilities companies today are numerous:

• inflation and rising rates, combined with an increased consumer awareness of rate increases
• inadequate customer communications
• lack of visibility on corporate citizenship and sustainability
• an aging workforce and increased talent scarcity
• rising customer expectations from increased CX initiatives in retail and other industries
• supply chain challenges and more frequent extreme weather events

In addition, as utilities and other consumer services industries become increasingly deregulated, and consumers have more options and information than ever, competition is getting fiercer and companies are having to do more than ever to decrease customer churn and acquire new customers.

What’s clear is that energy and utilities companies are being forced to adjust to changing market needs and expectations. That said, for those who can make the adjustment and meet today’s challenges, a more open marketplace allows them to gain wider market share and develop strong customer loyalty.

As consumer expectations rise among retail, health and travel brands, these increased expectations are spilling over into even utility purchases such as energy, consumer services, and the like.

Today’s customers aren’t shy about their growing expectations:

And customers are willing to put their money where their mouth is as well—68% of customers will pay more for products and services if they receive great customer service experiences, and 92% of customers will switch brands after just three (or fewer) negative customer service experiences.

As expectations change, energy and utilities companies need to implement focused strategies to meet and exceed rising consumer preferences and needs or risk losing their customers to competitors.

For many companies, this is where your contact center can make a sizable difference.

There’s no denying it: the digital experience is more essential than ever, and will only continue to gain prominence in customer expectations and preferences.

Research from McKinsey shows that among energy and utility companies, digital channels perform just as well as, or better than, traditional channels for meeting customer needs. Not just that—but they’re also more cost-effective and correlated with higher levels of customer satisfaction when done well.

That is: when customers are more satisfied with their digital experiences, they tend to be more satisfied with their experience of your brand overall.

So why aren’t more energy and utility companies investing in improved digital experiences? In part because digital transformation can be time-consuming, expensive, and disruptive to business operations.

However, a contact center can create a bridge between where you are and where you want to be, aiding and speeding your digital transformation to meet customers where they are today. Contact centers can not only help implement new digital channels, such as mobile apps, web support or live chat options, but they can also maintain and manage them, providing multi-channel customer support that exceeds customer expectations and offers always-on service.

Traditionally, energy and utility companies have siloed customer support, with separate teams for customer service, outage repairs, new customers and sales, and so on. All of these siloes not only increase complexity of your operations, but they slow down customer support—as customers may need to be frequently transferred between departments, decreasing efficiency for both you and your customers.

What’s more: energy and utility companies, perhaps more than any other industry, deal with unexpected and massive changes in call volume, typically following unforeseen outages, bad weather, grid failures or other issues. As these issues become more common across the country, energy and utility companies must prepare themselves for increased call volume and demand that can skyrocket at any moment.

When you’re managing call volume and customer service internally, there’s no good way to manage this—you’re either under-staffed for surges, protecting your overall costs but burning out employees and providing poor service, or you’re overstaffed during normal times, wasting time and resources.

The solution is an outsourced contact center, which can both eliminate silos—improving efficiency and streamlined customer service—and offer affordable scalability, allowing you to staff exactly who you need, when you need them.

For example, at ROI CX Solutions, we offer scalable teams and overflow staffing available to meet your scaling needs, no matter how quickly they come up. With overflow staffing, if call volume skyrockets suddenly, we can automatically route some of your calls to a team in the wings who can pick up slack. We also offer scalable solutions so you can scale your primary team up for more extreme seasons, or back for slower times of the year.

It’s no secret that customer satisfaction in the energy and utilities industry is declining—and there’s a lot that businesses are facing. A 2022 report showed that overall customer satisfaction in this industry is down 12 points from the previous year, in part driven by:

• rising rates and inflation burdens
• dissatisfaction with utility company communications
• awareness of increasingly unstable power quality and reliability
• increased consumer desire for energy sustainability and corporate citizenship

Improved customer satisfaction has a high correlation with business growth and sustainability. Consider the data:

With a contact center, your company can take necessary steps to increase customer satisfaction and retention through customer service, thereby increasing customer loyalty over time, expanding your market and boosting profits.

For example, research from McKinsey found that implementing best-in-class IVR systems created a 10% – 30% reduction in call volume for utilities companies. The change also resulted in 5% – 10% improvement in customer satisfaction. With a contact center, not only can you implement state-of-the-art technology, but you can also improve service levels, customer experience and overall CX strategy to increase customer satisfaction and retention from every angle.

When your services go down—for scheduled maintenance or severe weather outside of your control—you need effective crisis management. With a contact center, your customer service and communications are always in control.

As McKinsey states from their research,

The good news here for energy and utility leaders is that at least 50% of customer satisfaction following outages—arguably the most dissatisfying part of energy and utility providers—is well within providers’ control.

The key is effectively managing these factors within your control, such as timeliness of communication, clarity in customer support and creating easily accessible support. With a contact center, you can offer always-on customer support for outages to give your customers the most support possible. In addition, contact centers like ROI CX Solutions offer overflow support for high call volume periods and multi-channel or omnichannel support to increase accessibility and satisfaction.

Even if you have an in-house team, a contact center can centralize some of this communication and ensure that your team—and your customers—are supported during ballooning support periods.

Importantly, as energy and utility companies prepare for the future, contact centers aren’t only a support for customer service and customer satisfaction, but also for your own sales and marketing needs.

Not only can contact centers optimize your lead generation, delivering you higher-quality leads in less time and with fewer internal resources, they can also support an expansion in customer support to offer more affordable and high-quality expansion into new markets.

Consider that contact centers can provide:

• lead-generation services to increase warm leads
• scalable customer service
• affordable expansion of your team to support new markets
• multilingual customer service and support
• upselling and cross-selling services

As customer loyalty and audience growth becomes increasingly based on quality and satisfaction rather than geographic location or convenience, energy and utility companies who can capitalize on expanding markets and strengthen new leads can bolster their business growth for the coming years.

Internal customer support is simply not as sustainable, scalable or efficient as outsourced contact centers, and nowhere is this more true than with energy and utility companies.

In the energy and utility sector, an aging workforce also contributes to declining sustainability and efficiency—as your workforce ages, hiring and replacing staff can be costly and time-consuming, especially alongside other digital transformations and optimizations that need to happen to improve service and efficiency.

Further, many energy and utility companies attempt to focus on quality of service at the cost of quick and efficient service levels. While quality service is essential, speed and efficiency matter to customers as well. Contact centers offer many more ways to improve your operational efficiency, whether through:

The bottom line? Contact centers support and improve internal processes and efficiency, making your support more affordable, sustainable and better for customers as well.

That said, partnering with an outsourced contact center is an effective way to future-proof your operations.

Aside from aforementioned benefits, an outsourced contact center offers the ability to increase your focus on—and success with—customer engagement initiatives. And in today’s market—and the market of tomorrow—there’s few things that distinguish companies faster than strong customer engagement and satisfaction.

According to a recent study, proactive customer engagement is crucial in offsetting negative perceptions of energy and utility companies amidst inflation and rising rates as well as other market changes. When customers are more engaged with their utility companies—in the study, defined as participating in three or more product or service offerings—there was a 74-point increase in customer satisfaction.

Contact centers have specialized resources, talent and expertise dedicated to creating customer engagement and satisfaction strategies for your company, including increased proactive support, outbound communication, marketing and cross-selling, and expanded customer service.

For example, 80% of energy & utility customers say they want to get high-bill notifications—an obvious example of proactive support that not only meets customer preferences, but also decreases call center communications by 19%, improving efficiency. A contact center allows you to provide the proactive support that keeps customers in the loop and feeling cared for—and loyal to—your company, while also increasing your own operational efficiency and reducing costs.