As their presence in the national news highlights, energy and utilities providers are facing significant and unprecedented challenges. Customers now expect improved customer service and efficient, streamlined customer experiences, meaning that digitisation is now required across the industry. Energy and utilities companies need to adopt more proactive models when working with customers to match accelerating consumer expectations around digital interactions.
As part of our thought leadership discussion series, Solgari Speaking With…, Joe Leberte sat down with Johan Vandekerckhove from MECOMS, a Ferranti Brand, to discuss the changes and challenges that the energy and utilities industry is currently facing, emerging trends in the sector and how unified communications and Contact Centre as a Service solutions can help.
Here are the key takeaways from our discussion, to help guide your implementation of unified communication solutions in the energy and utilities sector.
New customer expectations underpin every interaction
Consumer expectations around digital interactions are accelerating rapidly. In the utilities industry, self-service via automation has emerged as a key trend, enabling customers to manage their own bills, meter readings, accounts and interactions. This unlocks higher customer satisfaction at a lower cost. Remote working practices have now disrupted traditional on-premise contact and call centres. In order to meet customer demands as efficiently as ever, utilities companies need to find new ways to make all communication channels available from any location, on any device, at any time. The answer lies in Cloud-provisioned communication solutions that integrate seamlessly with industry-specific operational technologies, CRM and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Data-driven decisions are essential
As energy and utilities companies introduce new communications strategies to meet demands, making data-driven decisions is essential. When data is siloed in separate applications and communication channels, it is impossible for different agents to understand the full picture of a customer journey. Solgari helps to bring customer data into a single source of truth, helping every agent to make contextual, informed decisions, no matter when they become involved in the interaction. For instance, Solgari have worked with MECOMS to integrate the full range of communications channels into the MECOMS 365 solution suite: specifically created for the Energy and Utilities industry and now helping eliminate communication data silos.
Increasing customer satisfaction reduces churn
As customer experience is paramount, energy and utilities companies need to prioritise providing a user-friendly, simple and convenient service for their clients. If customer communication channels are cumbersome and difficult to navigate, the customer experience will be negatively affected. Every customer is different, and they each have unique communication requirements. Using an all-channel communication solution allows customers to reach you in the way that suits them, without sacrificing efficiency for your agents.
Additionally, this solution will enable greater collaboration across internal teams within your organisation. Traditionally members of each department would each work with their own system. However, an all-channel contact centre solution, like Solgari, will consolidate these systems, allowing agents across departments to work on the same platform, with full data visibility. As 40% of utilities customers that are switching providers are never even contacted by the retention team, facilitating this transparency will help customer retention and offer additional upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Transform your communications strategy
To learn how the combination of both Solgari and MECOMS 365 enables transformative outcomes around customer engagement for any utility company with heavy communications requirements.
Watch our full webinar on-demand today.
