Trending at CS Week: AI, Data, and Customer Relationships

It was a pleasure to meet Re:Energize readers in person at CS Week, the first week in May. Everyone is doing interesting and transformative work, and I hope to feature many of your stories in future issues.

I spent most of my time staffing Salesforce’s booth so I only got to a few session tracks, but I did hear a lot from utilities and partners on the Expo floor and in meetings. Many of the customers who came to our booth had a keen interest in discussing what the current obsession with AI means for utility customer service.

I’ve got some broader reflections on this based on what I’m seeing in technology and software development as AI use cases evolve. In this issue I’ll share a basic framework for utilities to consider as you prepare for future AI capabilities.

How utilities can use AI to become even more customer-centric

As CS Week is the definitive gathering of customer service professionals in the utility industry, the underlying driver for the interest in AI was “how can technology help my organization become more customer-centric and improve service operations?” Customer-centric companies set themselves apart by applying strategic analytics and automation to create better customer experiences. By “better,“ I mean less confusion, less friction, and less feeling like a number in a vast impersonal system.

There are 7 things that customer-centric companies have:

1. Customer relationships centered on a 360-degree view of the customer
2. Data management and governance to support a Single Source of Truth
3. Personalized Customer Experiences and journeys
4. Automated industry best practices that leave more room for innovation
5. Productive Collaboration
6. Smart Operations Strategy
7. Education and training strategies that make every employee more excellent

Let’s take these one by one and hear some stories from CS Week to see how utilities can use their current momentum to get to a future state where AI and data can enhance customer relationships.

Utilities are already on this path, and you may be more ready than you think.

1. Building a Customer 360

AI, data analytics, and machine learning are more powerful when you can use every available data source all from one place, reconciling the known identities of a single customer into a unified view: the Customer 360.

ConEdison’s Customer 360 view goes beyond traditional Customer Information System (CIS) and Billing data. The creator of the first true power grid in the state is expanding its role from being a core commodity business (electric, gas, and steam) to being a leader in New York’s pivot to a clean energy economy. In this leadership role, ConEd is evolving with their customer base, offering more and more new electrification programs and services. ConEd is often the first place that a customer goes for energy advice, and in that trusted position the utility finds itself coordinating more external stakeholders. Dany Martinos, Head of Clean Energy Platform Engineering, Data and AI at ConEdison, said that the utility’s Customer 360 is growing to include data from programs, contractors and even the buildings where customers live and work. By pulling all of this insight into one view, ConEd can coordinate service and communications around each customer and align internal and third party service delivery. The utility is thus well-positioned to give New Yorkers more holistic, seamless and responsive experiences on their individual energy journeys.

2. Creating a Data Platform and Single Source of Truth

AI, data analytics and machine learning are more powerful when you can use every available data source all from one place, reconciling the known identities of a single customer into a unified view. Yet, almost every utility I heard from at CS Week mentioned that managing data was their top challenge to being able to create that 360-degree view of a customer. They wanted to be able to un-silo multiple data sources, trust that the data was up-to-date and accurate, and provide it to a wide range of stakeholders while maintaining security and access credentials. What they were asking for was essentially a Customer Data Platform (CDP). At Salesforce we think of it as a Data Cloud.

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad (MK) explains the general concept of a CDP beautifully in this blog. He says, "In a nutshell, CDPs are concerned with these primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation, and data insights." A platform approach helps utilities pull all their disparate data into a single source of truth, to be analyzed coherently and comprehensively. For an electricity, gas, or water utility or a renewable energy supplier, this gives your customer operations teams the power of real-time intelligence to better serve customers and act quickly and effectively in any situation.

With regard to GPT, we need to remember: garbage in, garbage out. A CDP is a necessary foundation for security and relevance, as the customer data platform would draw primarily from a utility’s own rich datasets (your own clean lake!) instead of the potentially problematic pool of the Internet.

3. Personalized Customer Experiences and Journeys

Judging from the number of sessions at CS Week that included the topics of personalization, empathy, and customer journeys, the utility industry is making great strides in this area. I heard from quite a few municipal utilities who took the opportunity during the pandemic to design much better coordination between social services and utility operations. For instance, utilities can use digital processes and form-captures to collect eligibility verification once and apply it to all other relevant applications. They can look at contextual data about the customer’s household, climate zone, and building stock to plan and prioritize services. The innovation that utilities are bringing to serving at-risk segments can be extended to other customer experiences too. A Customer 360 view makes it possible to serve customers in ways that make the most sense for them, whether it’s a simple matter of quick self-service options or more complex matters such as income-qualified clean energy programs or C&I sustainability-as-a-service packages. (The previous Re:Energize issue also discussed these kinds of innovations.)

4. Automation that leaves more room for innovation

Automating processes creates consistency and speed, and frees your team members to focus on serving effectively. Utilities are already taking advantage of AI and automation today as they design more sophisticated self-service strategies. Chatbots can handle routine verification processes and qualifying questions so that live agents are primed and ready to resolve the real issues on a service call. Process automation can trigger next-best-actions, triage cases, and route approvals to shorten the time it takes to resolve issues or onboard customers.

On the CS Week Expo floor, companies like Questline and GridX demonstrated how they are using data and automation to design the kinds of engaging customer experiences described above. GridX can take data from millions of meters and hundreds of tariff models to quickly tailor communications and usage insights for individual customers. Questline uses digital marketing tools like Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to design impactful customer journeys and run effective campaigns for everything from outage alerts to solar and EV adoption. My colleagues at the Salesforce booth had a lively discussion with the Questline team about EinsteinGPT and the wealth of personalized recommendations, nudges and knowledge that can now be surfaced more readily with generative AI.

In most cases, it’s still a human, not a robot, in contact with the customer, and with AI today those humans have an extra brain and hands.

5. Productive Collaboration

It was clear from the CS Week sessions I saw that while utilities are still thought of as siloed organizations, their customer strategies rely on cross-functional collaboration and data sharing to be successful. It was widely recognized that when we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes, anyone standing in front of the customer must be equipped to represent the utility and effectively satisfy the customer’s need. That long chain of people now includes contractors, building owners, social service agencies, and manufacturers of the machines that now qualify for clean energy incentives. Even the President is onto this trend.

Which brings me to the next point:

6. Smart Operations Strategy

NextEra’s Florida Power and Light saw an opportunity to create value and achieve efficiencies in customer operations by proactively meeting customer expectations and offering high-touch, personalized service. Of course, before they could fulfill such expectations, they needed to know their customers more fully. In a presentation with IBM’s Caroline Roche, NextEra’s Shankar Sengupta, Senior Director, Customer Service Experience explained FPL’s journey to move from merely “transacting with and servicing” customers to becoming full-fledged advisors with contextual data and situational insight.

They started with the high-value customer segment of key commercial and industrial (C&I) accounts. According to IBM’s research, Key Account Managers (KAMs) across companies agree that they could do a better job of taking care of their customers if they had more complete information at their fingertips. NextEra made this possible for their own KAMs by integrating two billing systems, 40 applications in the “CRM” category, and varying views of useful account information like store comparisons or program performance data. With a Customer 360 view, KAMs could shift from being transactive to being more consultative, creating much more value for customers at every touchpoint.

And, while the rollout focused on large C&I customers first, FPL’s strategy was to integrate ALL their customer data. They consolidated 200 applications into 4 platforms (Adobe, Salesforce, SAP and AWS), making Customer 360 possible across the rest of their entire Residential and C&I customer base when it’s time to roll out personalized service at scale.

7. Education and training strategies

Workforce preparedness was also on people’s minds at CS Week. With technology scaling up, humans will need to scale up too. Utilities are sharing sensitive customer data, AMI data, grid data and now even vehicle data with more stakeholders and making critical decisions together - to restore service, manage grid events, and serve customers more responsively. How are utility and energy professionals building the skills to use these tools responsibly and efficiently?

I have anecdotal evidence that the incoming class of industry professionals is a tech-savvy generation very comfortable with virtual assistance and self-training tools. But, they want great UI and UX to feed their quest for knowledge. A good example is Trailhead, a mobile learning app with engaging quizzes and rewards that make it easy and fun to learn new skills any where and any time. Anyone can earn a Trailblazer hoodie by going on Trailhead to learn in-demand skills related to Salesforce, cloud technology, and soft skills for the digital age - for free. One day when I was exploring the Charlotte Convention Center with Nicole Holmes, Certified Principal Enterprise Architect at Salesforce, she was wearing her Trailblazer hoodie. At the cafe, in the halls, even in the bathroom, people were stopping us to tell Nicole that they were also “Trailblazers” and that they had gotten their friends and co-workers to learn on the platform. People like Melvina, from the City of Greensboro (shown below) came to our booth to ask about any new features they hadn’t yet seen on Trailhead.

Virtual tools like Trailhead are great ways to create an army of experts. But we also need real life and real time events like CS Week. CS Week shines the spotlight on energy and water consumers. We need to work hand in hand with these consumers to ensure a sustainable future.

AI and machines will expand our capacity for knowledge and insight, but humans will build the algorithms, map the processes and make the decisions on what’s best for their customers. All the intelligence and speed that AI promises will not be of value if not governed by empathy.

Summing up: Utility Digital Customer Strategies Hinge on Customer Data

To create customer magic at a utility, you need to know your customers’ wants and needs in real time. You will need to assess your current mix of technology to create and disseminate that kind of insight, which is a complex undertaking. You can manage that complexity by building on a strong Customer Data Platform with AI, Data and Customer Relationship Management capabilities.

Most importantly, remember that the purpose of digital tools like CDP, AI, and CRM is to make our human relationships better. Customers will notice the transformation. At Salesforce, our utility customers using the Energy & Utilities Cloud see a 32% increase in customer satisfaction as a result of the strategies discussed here. Regardless of whether your utility is using Salesforce or another enterprise platform, considering the Seven Habits of a Customer Company can prepare your customer operations for a more intelligent and sustainable future.

Side Trails

Each issue I’ll post a few links to content or people to follow, so we can weave a stronger, denser, bigger network together. My picks for this week are ...

• The CS Week Connect podcast is a good place to keep up with customer service innovation in the utility space, if you can’t make it to CS Week events in person.
• My friend and former colleague Nathan Gastineau, an expert in electric, gas and water utility transformation, wrote CS Week Reflections that capture a lot of the Customer Experience highlights that I didn't cover here.
• This blog post from Delegate with a recap of the Salesforce World Tour NYC highlights from last December, where the idea of the 7 habits of customer companies was introduced.
• An upcoming webinar on Boosting Customer Engagement with AI, scheduled for Thursday, May 25, 2023, part of Questline’s Plugged In webinar series.
• Get on Trailhead and see how fun it is to learn skills for the digital age. You can start with this short module on the Energy & Utilities Cloud Console, helping utilities create a dynamic 360-degree view of customers.

My coverage of solutions or products are meant to expand awareness and should not be construed as endorsements. The views expressed in my newsletter and posts represent my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer, Salesforce. However, this issue was definitely inspired by some of the great work I’m seeing at said employer.