Whitepaper "Utilities & Power Industry: Customer Experience (CX) & Customer Data Platform (CDP)" ... by Sourajit Ghosh (SG)

Abstract

Note: Hereby in this whitepaper the Utilities and Power industry will be collectively called simply as Utilities to maintain brevity.?

Utilities customer experience (CX) journey

A typical customer in the utilities (& power) industry goes may go through a heterogenous journey wherein they experience (hence the term “customer experience”) interactions with the utilities companies’ assets:

1.?????Brand promotions, vouchers, emails, leaflets, green energy campaigns, etc

2.?????Digital assets like website, social media accounts, B2B port

3.?????Utilities employees like field technicians and call center agents representing the company

4.?????Physical assets like meters, solar panels, etc

5.?????Utilities power grids and installations

You may consider these simplistic stages of a customer journey while they interact with various aspects of customer experience as listed above:

Acquisition & move-in phase

1.?????Information

a.?????Receiving information about the utilities companies’ offerings

2.?????Move-in

a.?????Start gas and electricity service

b.?????Do legal & financial formalities with the provider

c.??????Contract creation

3.?????Portal registration

a.?????Registration & sign-up

b.?????Onboarding

c.??????Education & learning

d.?????Offer comparisons

e.?????Program enrolment

Active customer phase

1.?????Receiving bills

2.?????Bill inquires

3.?????Disputes

4.?????Energy usage insights

5.?????Rebate management

6.?????Payment arrangements

7.?????Outage – planned, unplanned

8.?????Routine & planned field service visit

9.?????Reactive field service visit

10.?Emergency services like accident, gas leaks, electricity hazard, etc

Termination of services

1.?????Determine shut-off dates in existing premise – and communicate to schedule the termination date

2.?????Settlement & pay of any dues

3.?????Communication of new address (in-case needed for refund to be forwarded, etc)

4.?????Final notification – acknowledgement of shut-off and termination of older service in premise

Customer experience (CX) overview

In this whitepaper, the scope of customer experience (CX) pertains to lines of business related to sales, service, marketing, e-commerce, customer management. Essentially the 3 processes outlined below here.

Campaign to cash

·??????Engaging unknown prospects to known customer

·??????Customer identity, registration, access & onboarding management

·??????Personalized profile management of the customer with 360-degree view

·??????Segmentation, targeting & positioning

·??????Campaign management

·??????Lead management

·??????Opportunity management

·??????Quote management

·??????Configure, price, quote, offer, proposal management

·??????Order management

·??????Integration of the above processes with back-office sales order to cash, logistics, finance, inventory management, master data management

Service problem to resolution

·??????Self-service engagement platform and portal

·??????Service problem initiation

·??????Omni-channel service

·??????Call center telephony

·??????Service ticket engagement

·??????Customer service case management

·??????Service planning & resource scheduling

·??????Field service

·??????Asset management

·??????Warranty

·??????Service logistics

·??????Repair and return management

·??????Knowledge management

·??????Integration of the above processes with back-office service order to cash, logistics, finance, inventory management, master data management

Commerce to Delivery

·??????Omni-channel e-commerce experience

·??????B2B & B2C – portal & self-service platform

·??????Web content management

·??????Product content management

·??????Promotions & offers

·??????Browse and cart

·??????E-commerce storefronts

·??????Headless commerce

·??????Digital payments

·??????Available to ship

·??????Order distribution

·??????Fulfilment (online-offline mix)

·??????EDI management for sales orders

·??????Integration of the above processes with back-office sales order to cash, logistics, finance, inventory management, master data management

Relevance of customer data platform @ utilities industry

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is now creating significant value for organizations and in the future will drive breakthrough innovations in the space of digital transformation. Digital transformation in the utilities industry will enable you to enhance the customer experience your organization provides and to strengthen your own organization’s competitive differentiation in the marketplace. Customer Data Platform (CDP) has the potential of significantly transforming your organization’s business strategy via digital transformation to enable accelerated revenue growth, higher customer lifetime value and improved customer experience.

To drive this customer experience digital transformation, you would need to make Customer Data Platform (CDP) as the heart of both your business as well as technology strategy.

Customer data driven strategy design is relevant for various types of organizations in the Utilities industry:

1.?????Electric power

2.?????Natural gas

3.?????Water supply

4.?????Steam supply

5.?????Sewage & garbage removal

As leaders in your respective organizations, you may consider these 4 key data & process universes to align and feed your centralized customer data platform:

1.?????Utilities meter to cash

2.?????Omnichannel MarTech, CRM & Retail

3.?????Customer self-service & commerce

4.?????Utilities & renewable energy

And then there is the need to blend, connect, integrate your:

1.?????Utilities Service & Asset Platform

2.?????Customer Data Platform

The value is allowing your organization to engage with your customers holistically and providing them the delightful customer experience fueled by data coming from a centralized customer data platform connected to all relevant technology applications.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) overview

The objective of CDP is simple: to convert customer data into actionable insights to significantly grow your sales revenue, marketing return-on-investment and customer lifetime value.

CDP is a software platform wherein you can ingest customer relevant data from various data sources, unify and contextualize that data, make business actionable meaning from that data, derive relevant customer insights including predictive recommendations, and then trigger real-time action to drive business objectives pertaining to customer experience.

Following are some of the key aspects of technology stack & functionality which you may need while designing your customer data platform:

Customer Data Platform

Dynamic omnichannel l progressive profile | Behavior | Sentiments | Experience | Audience segmentation | Personalization | Data ingestion | Identity & access | Data & process Integration | ML&AI | Data exploration | Predictive algorithms | Insights & analytics | KPIs | Data governance & orchestration | Data pipelining & processing | Model design | Privacy | Cross system workflows | Recommendations | Upsell cross-sell | Real time action | Multi-tenant cloud | Customer journey | Customer 360 | Single View

Utilities Service & Asset Platform

Utilities asset lifecycle | Meter readings l Energy program | Enterprise asset management | Maintenance & service | Customer service | Invoices | Attachments | Utilities contract | Warranty & claim management | Move-in Move-out | Collections | B2B account | Asset performance | IOT | Digital twin | Field service | Project management I Portfolio management I Digital twin I Resource scheduling & dispatch I Managing meter events and notifications ! Asset risk management I Predictive service & asset management I IOT & sensors I Asset network I Outage management?

The key to a successful business strategy & enterprise architecture design is the perfect synergy and harmony between:

1.?????Customer experience

2.?????Customer data platform

3.?????Utilities service & asset platform

Utilities industry & technology trends

Macro-trends

The utilities industry has been going through some key transformations over the last few years:

§?Political intervention & regulation

§?Increasing competition

§?Hyper-personalized customer experience

§?Rapid innovations in business models

§?Hyper-growth in technology innovations

§?Renewable energy & sustainability

Given the above it’s important to take a step back and recognize some key enterprise technology trends which is impacting the Utilities industry.

Data intelligence as a strategy

We live in a data driven economy now where it is the intelligent usage of your enterprise data which will enable you to differentiate yourself from your competitors.?As we move in 2020, we will see these 3 forces joining hands even more:

§?Master data orchestration, distribution & governance

§?Data science. Machine learning, Artificial intelligence & predictive analytics

§?Business actionable insights at the moment of decision making

In other words, securely leveraging the power of your enterprise data from wherever it resides via data pipelines, apply advanced intelligence to that data holistically, and use those intelligent insights in various line of business to take critical business decisions; and to do this easily, near real-time and in a scalable manner.

IOT, autonomous automation, drones & edge computing, artificial intelligence

You will see increased convergence of robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) resulting in powerful use-cases related to autonomous automation becoming real. We have already seen the growth of drones. Given the increased cyber-attacks, identity thefts and enterprise security breaches and also the increased regulatory policies related to customer privacy, autonomous automation will also have to be connected to your overall organization enterprise architecture.

Consider a different industry apart from Utilities – a batch processing in chemical plants; with a combination of edge computing, IOT and autonomous automation – the ability to look at complex big data based on chemical recipes, batch data and thermal imaging and then taking decisions real-time on handling impurities will result in tremendous savings for organizations.

Similarly, autonomous drones (unmanned aerial systems) in utilities installations and power plants, facilitate risky service inspections and gather data and help improve machine and pipeline maintenance.

Consider customer & asset engagement at the edge. 3 key business-technology concepts will shape that experience:

§?Edge computing & IOT (internet of things)

§?In the moment secured personalization driven by machine learning recommendations

§?Data insights from entire connected value chain

Green Hydrogen

We will be reading more about renewable energy later. However, it is imperative to mention one of the big trends is the tremendous investments happening in the space of Green Hydrogen (also called renewable hydrogen) – Hydrogen obtained by electrolysis of water. The ability to do this in mass scale, will thus allow energy being generated entirely by renewable energy and thus it generates no polluting emissions into the atmosphere.

Synergy and value chain

The concepts of integration & collaboration take on a whole new meaning going forward in this new world. Gone are those days when we are just talking about 2 APIs being joined to complete a business process or 2 teams having a common workspace where their chat and collaborate to solve a common business problem.

True synergy is created when data (operational & experience) seamlessly flows across all business process creating value for the stakeholders. You will see the increased usage of micro-services driven event-based integration usage of connecting various key applications to solve a common business problem. You will see organizations consolidating on an experience platform connected to the whole value chain (lead to cash, inquiry to resolution, procure to pay, etc) leveraging pre-packaged integration flows driving business outcomes. You will also see how this value chain of data and insights surfaces at the very edge: the moment of experience for your customers.

Utilities Service & Asset Platform

Consider the following systems & processes listed below and relevant insights from your Utilities Service & Asset Platform which you will have to integrate and work with your Customer Data Platform (CDP). However, do note that only bring in header level data and KPIs relevant to drive meaningful customer experiences aligned with your business strategy into the CDP. ?

Customer service, field service and customer management

1.?????Managing accounts and business agreements

2.?????Managing service locations

3.?????Account overview

4.?????Premise overview

5.?????Billing information and correction

6.?????Maintaining budget billing plans

7.?????Financial inquiries

8.?????Collections

9.?????Service management in the interaction center

10.?Entering meter reading results

11.?Customer Requests Disconnection / Reconnection

12.?Managing Meter Events and Text Messages

13.?Resource scheduling & dispatch

14.?Credit Risk Rating and Credit Check

15.?Proposing Products and Product Packages

16.?Managing Energy Quotations

17.?Selling Energy Supply Products

18.?Resource planning

19.?Field service execution & mobility

Asset management

1.?????Asset planning (investment, design, installation and delivery projects, commissioning)

2.?????Asset performance management

3.?????Asset risk

4.?????Asset project management

5.?????Asset network

Data & insights management

1.?????Asset digital twin

2.?????IOT & Sensor data

3.?????Asset connected network

4.?????Asset analysis – faults, service, maintenance, criticality

5.?????Predictive insights & analytics

Utilities meter to cash

When it comes to the process of meter to cash, you are considering an integration of customer & asset relevant insights from the following data systems into your Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Utilities core enterprise resource planning (ERP)

1.?????Master data – customer, material, assets, employees, premises, projects

2.?????Core asset management

3.?????Portfolio & project management

4.?????Operations management

5.?????Billing

6.?????Subscriptions

7.?????Convergence

8.?????Finance & accounting

9.?????Commodity management

10.?Revenue management for energy, water & services

11.?Meter lifecycle management

12.?Human resource management

Utilities supply chain

1.?????Key segments of value chain

a.?????Generation

b.?????Transmission

c.??????Distributed and meter operators

d.?????Retailers & Aggregators

2.?????Sourcing & procurement

a.?????Plan & forecast

b.?????Central procurement management

c.??????Contracts management in sourcing

d.?????Supplier risk management

e.?????Direct & Indirect goods procurement

f.???????Invoice & pay

g.??????Logistics management & execution

h.?????Demand & Supply planning

Omnichannel MarTech & CRM

Customer identification & consent

Sometimes a strength can also become a weakness. If there is one big risk about the power of technology in the space of MarTech, it is that it has become a bit too powerful. You are aware yourself as a consumer the feeling you get when you are in an online shopping website or on a social media site and you get this intrusive feeling that the digital site knows a bit too much about you. And thus, it then becomes extremely critical to respect the privacy of the customer and have privacy baked into each moment of customer experience.

Consider privacy as a coin. There are thus two sides of this coin. One is the customer identity & access management (CIAM). The other is customer consent. The two together is essential to work together.

Imagine a scenario. You have a consumer who is upset about a customer experience and calls up your call center to complain about something. Few minutes later that customer gets 2 emails. One is from the customer service asking for feedback. And somehow, they also land up getting an email from your marketing automated campaigns on an upcoming promotion. Not the perfect time to sell something to someone if they are upset. Your customer service CRM system must thus be connected to your Marketing system in this case – to identify that customer has the same. Your CIAM system thus must be connected to all systems where customer data resides to uniquely identify and provide relevant access to that customer data.

Now let’s consider customer consent. On one hand you are driven legal customer data regulations of your respective country and region when it comes to customer data privacy. On the other hand, you must also respect the preferences and consent of the customer themselves for better customer experience.

And thus, omnichannel customer personalized engagement driven by your MarTech has to have both CIAM and Consent tightly locked with your tech-stack and marketing execution.

CRM

In the utilities space you are looking at the world of CRM (customer master, sales & service) working very closely with Customer Data Platform. CRM remaining your source of transactional data repository, CDP will be more of the customer data orchestration layer making all kinds of data (including CRM) more real-time & actionable.

CDP insights will also have to be sent to CRM so that the customer service agent is able to view and act on the actionable insights in CDP.

Following are some data elements you may consider while integrating a CDP with CRM:

1.?????Service tickets

2.?????Leads

3.?????Survey feedback

4.?????Customer satisfaction score

5.?????Service resolution KPIs

6.?????Knowledge management content engagement across all digital channels & connected customer inquiries

Audience segments

You can begin with creating audience segments using the above KPIs & scores. It will also be prudent to consider creating audience segments to map the customer journey and based on moments of events along that customer journey set-up triggers of actions. With the vast volume of data, having a good data catalog is also advisable. A good data catalog is not just an inventory of your data assets enriched via meta data; it is also an extremely critical way for the business users in marketing to get access to the customer experience data in easily comprehensible manner. A data catalog will help in data governance and data access to various stakeholders like the campaign manager, marketing leads, marketing analyst, digital analyst, data science team.

Segmentation as a concept is rooted in the oldest traditions of marketing and is still relevant even today. A good segmentation business strategy equipped with a powerful MarTech platform can help you target and position your brand effectively and efficiently to the right segments. Segmentation today also has to be driven towards on which channel will be the engagement experience. It has to have the ability to bring in omnichannel data from diverse data sources, model the segments in a myriad possible way and then create meaningful segments driven by all kind of marketing attributes like transactional information, behavioral data, demographic insights, psychographic profiling, predictive scores, etc.

Personalized engagement

This is where the rubber hits the road. Personalized engagement is where your entire investment behind the scenes in your MarTech gets real and interfaces with the front-end actual customer experience.

You are creating activations connected to customer experience by controlling the customer journey flows and embedding the flows with real-time actions. These actions will have to automatically get triggered across any customer experience connected applications e-commerce, social media, CRM, websites, mobile apps, emails, online community, call center, sales interaction, etc. These omnichannel triggers will be driven by dynamic automation??a combination of heuristics and machine learning algorithms driving real-time personalization.

MarTech makes marketing to one real. You can drive personalized predictive recommendations for each customer and then scale it to your entire segment and customer base. You can use artificial intelligence tools to drive smart experience in context real-time across the whole customer lifecycle from clickstream nurturing to customer for life loyalty program to customer advocacy and retention.

Key pure marketing integrated CDP experiences

1.?????Marketing

a.?????Advertising & promotion

?????????????????????????????????????????????????i.?????Programmatic Ad

????????????????????????????????????????????????ii.?????Ad/Promos relevant customer data: mail, print, video, mobile, display

??????????????????????????????????????????????iii.?????Data Management Platform (DMP)

??????????????????????????????????????????????iv.?????Demand Side Platform (DSP)

????????????????????????????????????????????????v.?????Web Analytics, Tag Mngt

b.?????Content & Experience (how customers are engaging with content)

?????????????????????????????????????????????????i.?????Search engine optimization (SEO)

????????????????????????????????????????????????ii.?????Campaign & mktg automation

??????????????????????????????????????????????iii.?????Interactive media, video engagement, marketing content

c.??????Social & Relationships (customer data)

?????????????????????????????????????????????????i.?????Social media communities & apps

????????????????????????????????????????????????ii.?????Influencer, Advocacy, Referrals

??????????????????????????????????????????????iii.?????Portal, knowledge management, self-service

Customer self-service & Commerce

Self-service mobile app and portal

Firstly, we are looking at self-service and commerce together. Give the customers much more than a mobile app/website/e-commerce store where they are able to go beyond a transactional experience.

Provide your customers real-time insights into their utility usage (water, electricity, solar, etc). ?Guide and recommend them into their consumption patterns and how to change their demand patterns to off-peak times. This is taking the power of Utilities recommendation hyper-personalized to one single household/premise.

And then using the same platform allow the customers to not just do basic transactions like bill payments, service requests, etc but also subscribe or buy energy programs, and also get alerts and notifications for outages, emergency reporting, etc.

We live today in an unprecedented world of customer experience. With exponential growth in technology and rapid evolution of disruptive business models, the world of customer engagement has dramatically changed in the last few years. Gone are those days when you could go about building the customer facing portion of your organization’s digital transformation strategy around the traditional boundaries of marketing can offer both as a business outcome & also technology strategy.?And this is not just an “incremental” change – it’s a massive transformation from the point of view of economics, philosophy, and technology.

More importantly, there has been a humongous change in customer’s psychology of high demands, instant gratification & expecting complete end-to-end delightful experience.

And so MarTech must evolve now again to look at this space holistically and comprehensively as one integrated business value chain & as one integrated technology platform – with the customer experience as the center and origin of the business architecture design.

CDP @ Utilities & Omnichannel Retail

If you are thus able to connect these applications real-time to a centralized CDP; this will help you both to provide the customer, the 1:1 real-time personalized experience in store and push real-time promotions to them as a part of connected journeys.?

These touchpoints (channels where engagement is happening) and transactions (what items at what price with promotions consumers are buying) gives you deep insights into customer experience. It is also imperative that you gather other insights beyond transactions like online clickstream data, in-store event engagements, physical coupon sent via mail at home redeemed in stores, etc.

Thus, this brings the need to bring in all relevant consumer engagements, transactions & interactions from these relevant utilities specific fulfillment systems & consumer processes into your CDP:

1.?????Omnichannel utilities promotions used by which customer

2.?????Omnichannel utilities pricing leveraged by customer during purchase

3.?????Omnichannel utilities category & items – both browsing & purchase data

4.?????Digital content management & digital assets insights from e-commerce/website/mobile apps platform & connected customer insights

Utilities & renewable energy

Sources of utilities & power industry based on energy type

Non-renewable

1.?????Nuclear

2.?????Heating oil

3.?????Petroleum products & oil

4.?????Gasoline

5.?????Diesel fuel

6.?????Natural gas

7.?????Coal

8.?????Renewable

Renewable

1.?????Solar

2.?????Hydropower

3.?????Wind power

4.?????Biofuels such as ethanol

5.?????Hydroelectric

Given the above, in context to your Customer Experience (CX) – how must you as a utilities industry organization focus on this topic? You need to define a customer-centric sustainability strategy, thereby driving your brand equity in such a way that your customers perceive your brand as high in sustainability messaging.

You can read more on this theme in this whitepaper: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/whitepaper-sustainability-centric-brand-equity-sourajit-ghosh-sg-/

Recommendations on next steps to design & implement CDP

Firstly, a word of caution. Do NOT consider bringing ALL transactional data from ALL possible systems into CDP. The goal is to identify key business objectives and use-cases which you may want to drive using a centralized CDP, then identify which systems needs to prioritize and then within each system what relevant header/aggregate/KPI driven data needs to be considered first.

CDP implementation is best done when the business organization works cohesively with the IT organization to first set clear business objectives and then in a phased-wise prioritized use-cases driven approach – relevant aspects of CDP is implemented connected to relevant data systems. My suggestion is use methods like design thinking to bring together relevant key stakeholders in your organization and CDP experts to collaborate, brainstorm and come up with first business use cases and then design the to-be technology architecture landscape. Then follow it implementation design plan for a phased wise implementation and adoption of the CDP platform across your various lines-of-business like sales, marketing, customer service, e-commerce, customer success.

You may also consider creating a business case for CDP. One of the key values of CDP is it creates Synergy. In an earlier whitepaper of mine (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/strategy-customer-experience-integrated-operating-model-ghosh) I had explained a mathematical model to measure Synergy – the valuation model. You may use this model to create a financial business case for your CDP implementation. The snapshot below is a summary of the Synergy model

Potential target architecture design for CDP & CX in a utilities & power company

Personal Disclaimer

The content expressed in this publication is purely the personal opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of organization the author works for.?