IDC Study on Utility Customer Operations Transformation

IDC surveyed 400 utilities and energy retailers to understand how far customer-operations transformation has progressed. Only one in four respondents are more than three years into transformation and report having largely delivered the outcomes they expected. IDC calls this group advanced utilities and compares them with the rest of the sample on capabilities and results. IDC scored each respondent's capabilities on a five-level maturity model across five domains: customer experience, data, AI, technology architecture, and delivery governance. It measured six business outcomes separately from that model to examine how capabilities relate to those outcomes.

This InfoBrief shows where most utilities sit on the model, why personalization is the clearest capability marker of a successful transformation, and why cost savings behave differently from the other five outcomes. It closes with four priorities for customer-operations leaders.