Over the past few years, aggressive competition has led to unprecedented customer churn. Some utilities are reporting as high as 20-25% churn YoY in markets like the UK or Australia.
At the same time, customer expectations of the energy retailer industry has risen, particularly with respect to more transparency and better service. That’s meant the cost to attract and retain customers has remained very high.
Amidst this squeeze, the only way for you to reduce churn and cost-to-serve is by strengthening customer relationships. Those relationships must extend beyond being purely price-based to differentiated energy experiences that add value to your customers’ lives through proactive and timely communication.
Getting to World Class Customer Relationships
Telling customers about the great service they’re receiving and creating new reasons to contact customers is necessary, but not sufficient. World class customer relationships today mean you’re there for customers when they need you most. Like when they’re receiving a high bill, just moving in or renewing a contract. More than that, your best-in-class peers are showing up for moments driven by their customers themselves, like when they buy a new Electric Vehicle (EV), have a baby or retire.
Here are just a few ways we at Bidgely have helped utilities forge deeper connections with their customers:
- Help each customer understand which appliances use the most energy in their homes, what is efficient and what isn’t, as well as what to do about it.
- Offer alerts driven customer journeys that proactively inform customers about abnormally high usage or an upcoming high bill, while giving them the tools to save energy before they’ve incurred costs.
- Let customers feel in control from the first day they sign up by enhancing the onboarding experience. Give customers the tools and insight they need to get through those often-shocking initial bills, and help relieve their indecision about whether to stay with you or find a better deal.
- Play a key role in customers’ EV experiences by proactively detecting which customers have EVs, help them find the best tariffs and the right time to charge, guide them to the relevant EV charger and minimize their spends.
By leveraging artificial intelligence, Bidgely’s UtilityAI empowers you to detect, anticipate, personalise and enrich those key moments, increasing customer satisfaction, building trust and improving customers’ retention.
The Future of Utility-Consumer Interactions
But customer engagement is a never ending battle and that’s why we continue to invest in the future. As retailers build more customer trust, they have the opportunity to elevate their customer relationship to an unprecedented level by offering customers new relevant products and services when they need it the most. By leveraging AI, meter data, local contextual data (ie social media cookies, regional events, etc) and customers behaviours, Utilities are ideally positioned to offer recommendations that are personalised, timely and fit-for-purpose. By helping Utilities transform their business model from selling purely electricity to a multipoint user monetization based on acquired customer data, Bidgely helps you increase customer loyalty while generating new revenue.
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