‘Utility Customer’ Unified Data Platform: Why & What & Who

2021?gave me a very good opportunity to look at a Utility Customer (Data) from multiple dimensions well beyond what I used to see through traditional Utility CIS/CRM platform or custom applications built for various customer serving groups including back office and contact center.

This article is a mere point of view through my understanding of business imperatives required for a C360 initiative and what are potential Must/Should/Would/Don’ts in conceptualizing Customer Data platform for Utility

Note:?Please ignore if you are looking for technical or system know-hows for C360 data platforms in this article.

Utility Customer: Adding new dimensions

Utility industry is changing, so is the Utility customer:?2011 to 2015 was celebrated as an era of Social and Mobile’s rising dominance to the point when they become part of life after. It was just followed by rise of “Prosumers” with Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) installation with fall in solar/wind/BESS resource prices.

Digital disruptions kept on moving especially after COVID-19 stuck the world which caused customers to work, shop, eat and entertain through digital channels at unprecedented rate. This is also the time when we also started looking at great demand for utility service delivery through self-serve digital channels including control over energy consumption and payment assistance programs.

There are new Customer class evolving over the time not just in terms of different service consumers like EV customers, Net metering customers, home services etc. but also in terms of new needs like new payment offerings, online products, sale incentives.

“This vividness in Utility customers has forced Utilities to break customers in variety of segments to focus, prepare, communicate and serve better”

Utility in digital race with non-Utilities:?85% of US customers carry smart phone with a world of digital service apps start from Banking, insurance, food delivery, entertainment and social media. 82% of customers prefer self-serve channel over other delivery channels.

This has created a sense of urgency for Utilities to benchmark themselves against other industries when it comes to gain customer’s mindshare and way of life. May it be delivering personalized experience through a native mobile App, online portal or AI/ML powered customer care.

But will this end here?? How to know what is next move of customer? What should be the next move for the Utility? When and how to execute it? How to make entire business model sustainable in unprecedent time? And The answer lies in Customer Data. Let us try to understand how.

Utility Customer Data: Create a customer “Avatar”

After investing so much in AMI, digital service delivery, marketing communication, customer outreach, advocacy and survey channels, Today’s Utility is sitting on huge huge Customer data in terms of volume, variety and velocity more than what used to be kept in traditional CIS/CRM back-office applications earlier.

More Customer data is available in terms of web searches, self-serve interactions over Utility Portal. Data is collected from Mobile App usage and IVR or customer care interactions.

Utilities are also partnering with Social and media platforms to get more data about their customers to get even better insights to understand better.

As we go on, Business has another problem at hand. Now when I have this data from all customer channels and smart grid, how to use Customer data most effective way and the answer lies in who is asking this question?

1. First, Customer himself who wants to understand his consumption behavior, best offers, payment assistances or predicted bill for summer.
2. Customer care Advisor would ask for 360 information on Customer to serve customer faster and effective. May If I can predict what customer may want?
3. Sales and Marketing team would ask for precise customer segmentation for effective product and service marketing and communications based on usage and behavior
4. DRMS/DSM team would ask for accurate customer profiling based on past response to DSM event
5. Customer Advocacy teams may want to get an accurate customer profile report to analyze and serve better
6. Digital Team may want to predict new digital/tech savvy customers who are likely to use self-serve services

Every Business operation may have a different view of customer when gathering the details and organizing it.

Therefore, next question becomes How to enable organization of this entire world of customer data?

This is where Multidimensional Customer Profile ‘Avatar’ or golden data which can help to structure that data. And, to enable this we need an effective and robust system which can organize the data and cater to all requirements from different business operations.

One Customer Data Platform: Connecting the dots

Unified Customer Data platform is not new concept. It may be as simple as a database or a multidimensional data warehouse or a data lake with huge historic data. But as discussed in previous section, it should be able to support all data consumers to serve customer and operate business better.

Main objective of such system to reduce ambiguity in the customer data collected over different avenues and systems and help building One Customer Profile — a golden copy of Customer data

Building Customer Profile is a series of steps?where first Customer data is collected from CRM, digital channels (mobile/Web Portal), survey systems, marketplace, social media data platforms and staged to be further cleaned and unified at customer level and then, stored into Customer Data Platform using business rules through ETL processes.

There are many business imperatives of building a Customer Data Platform:

1. Certainly, Single view of Customers for all business operations to collaborate and serve better. Field Service team should have same information of customer service orders that a customer advisor has
2. One Page Customer Understanding — Highly effective Customer information available for immediate actions i.e., recent interactions, usage metrics, behavior flags, enrolled services and products, account/premise events etc.
3. Support Prediction Models to understand high propensity or inclinations towards a set of services, products or programs, a customer may have
4. Accurate and Immediate reporting available for operation, executive and regulatory teams for faster decision making
5. Create a two-way communication with customers for implementing DRMS programs
6. Categorize Customer profiles based on behavioral, economic and social indicators for personalized product and services offerings and marketing communication

But there are various question Utility should be asked when building such platform required for setting-up rules for collection, unification and storing customer data:

1. What Customer/Service types and attributes are must, should or not required. Ex: Are we interested in using Customers with no active accounts for past 1 year. Are we interested in storing X service customers which is not served anymore?
2. List of Long term and short-term business cases to be built on Customer data. For Example: Short term objective could be just building real time reporting Vs long term could be Customer Behavioral profile building
3. Which Source/Channel of Data is must, should or not required to build customer profile
4. How much historical data would be sufficient to build such system and support business cases

Thinking beyond Data Platform

Now final question comes to mind after having such platform in real?

Now system is ready to be leveraged as Customer Story builder than a customer data Management platform where customer or customer segment understanding, service, interaction and feedback can be enabled in faster and cost-effective manner.

“True Customer Data Platform should focus on Customer Story rather than just building customer profile”

Platform should be able to support any situation with Customer in order provide hyper personalized service. Let us take a raw example:

Tarun called Customer Care of a Utility..

IVR captures Tarun Phone and identified and confirm Account details along with potential reason(s) of call which is available for Advisor to look at.

Advisor’s screen popups with Tarun’s profile showing Tarun’s CRM information + he owns EV + recently opened account and a French speaking person.

Advisor is also able to view Tarun’s frequent visits on Utility’s Mobile App — daily usage and billing pages in last 48 hours (about 2 days) under recent Customer Activities section.

Advisor can see Tarun has liked a tweet by Utility about a new service for low-income category this week.

Advisor can also see Tarun’s summer usage is 30% more than last summer.

System displays potential offerings for Tarun that there is >85% probability Tarun has called regarding cost saver plans.

Advisor confirms reason of call with Tarun and let Tarun know his standing in similar customer profiles and potential reason of high usage.

Advisor proposes to enroll in X savings plan which Tarun also looked at. Before sharing enrollment details. Advisor can see Tarun has Utility Portal Account created but never logged in. Advisor can help with details available online

Advisor flags Tarun profile for next month’s Marketing Email campaign on savings in the summer tips..        

This example is too small to demonstrate hundreds of situations Data platform can help building customer stories.

Disclaimer: This article elaborates my personal views and opinions only and do not represent the same for organization I currently work for or worked in the past.