by Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of enterprise tech Storyblok explains why energy providers are enhancing the consumer experience
For a long time the energy sector seemed to be immune to the wholesale digital disruption that had transformed other industries such as e-commerce. After all, in most countries, a handful of providers dominate the consumer market. Competition was inevitably all about price and additional services such as boiler maintenance coverage. The need for complex websites providing enhanced customer experiences was simply not necessary. However, that dynamic has changed. Increased competition from new entrants, a greater focus on sustainability, and higher consumer expectations has led to energy companies rethinking their online offering.
Added into the mix is the cost of living crisis – driven by soaring gas and electricity prices. The result is that consumers are more acutely aware of their utility bills and demanding cheaper, greener energy. Businesses are also under pressure to show their green credentials. Customers, therefore, require more information and transparency on energy production. They are also more inclined to switch providers and prioritise customer service.
Pressure from new digital-first entrants to the market has also led legacy energy providers to reevaluate their online offering. At Storyblok, we’ve seen first hand how this focus on the digital experience has led to a range of energy companies overhauling their tech infrastructure to facilitate faster, more complex and intuitive web offerings. In the past few years, we’ve worked with a range of big and small B2B and B2C organisations from across Europe. What unites all these businesses is the pressing need to up the online experience to match what consumers experience in the e-commerce sector. This is best exemplified by Octopus Energy which has centralised all of its content management and integrated all of its platforms through APIs. This gives its marketing team the freedom to quickly adapt Octopus’ output in line with the changing needs of the business and its customers – much like how e-commerce businesses prioritise rapid responses to market conditions.
Inevitably, this is just the start of a transformation in how energy customers interact with their customers. Again, we can look to the e-commerce sector to point the way forward. Hyper personalisation driven by advanced data science techniques is one of the most important trends – covering both marketing and how products are offered to customers. The energy sector will inevitably see a greater move towards personalised products and offers. This will necessitate even more holistic online offerings that can serve tailored advice and product content.
The key to a fully personalised experience is a single customer view that can support an end-to-end customer experience. This means tying together all the touch points a customer can have with an organisation, collecting the relevant data, managing this information in a unified way, and having the tools, expertise and processes to analyse and action it. Ideally, it results in a business creating a system where a customer gets exactly the right information and services, delivered at the right time and in the right location. Retailers have expended considerable resources to reach this goal – learning a large number of lessons along the way. Energy companies will increasingly focus on this aspect of their business, drawing lessons from the digital transformation of retailers and the approach taken by e-commerce companies. What will be fundamental is integrating the insights gleaned from a single customer view into the services offered via their website and the messages they push via their marketing channels.
AI more generally is also being pioneered by online retailers. Currently, these services take their most visible form in smart chat bots, but behind the scenes AI is increasingly powering the generation of copy and imagery. Again, energy companies are likely to follow suit and more readily leverage these AI products.
The connective tissue that has enabled all these trends is a substantial shift in how businesses view their tech stack. Gone are the days where inflexible and expensive monolithic architecture was the only option to effectively manage business operations. Now, companies of every size are embracing composable architecture that allows them to marry individual platforms that are perfectly tailored to their needs – everything from data management to CMS. Our experience with energy companies has shown that many have taken heed of the success e-commerce companies have experienced going down this route, and are embracing updating their tech infrastructure as a means to facilitate the enhanced experiences that they know their customers now expect.
The energy sector will know it has caught up with other industries when hyper personalised products are the norm, customers can switch energy suppliers or get new services at a few clicks of the button, and gone are the days of waiting on the phone for customer support. Everything their customers will want and need will be delivered by their online offering. The companies that will achieve this transformation the fastest will be those that focus on cutting-edge tech infrastructure.
