Utility Week

I N A S S O C I A T I O N W I T H 26 | 19TH - 25TH OCTOBER 2018 | UTILITY WEEK have meant they have struggled to cope with a sudden influx of customers. In a highly-publicised incident, Iresa ceased trading in July. Ofgem had opened an investigation into the supplier in February to determine whether it had breached licence conditions and consumer complaints-handling standards. A thorough understanding of the customer journey, then, is arguably even more important to smaller suppliers, who do not necessarily have the systems and processes to protect customers clearly in place. Thunderhead's Whyte says that, in principle, smaller suppliers are "prized with far more opportunity to benefit from positive growth". It is also true that smaller means more shared goals, and fewer divisions – which is "only a good thing", he suggests. "It's easier to put customers at your heart when your body is smaller, to stretch a metaphor." However, he warns, fierce ambition can be "overshadowed by a lack of preparation for expansion". "Speedy growth, without being backed up by longer-term product, technology and service investments and experience, creates a vacuum – and as Iresa customers saw earlier in the year, this can cause varying levels of implosion. In this situation, departments may well be getting on, but customers are certainly not." Vickers agrees, pointing out that serving 5,000 or 50,000 customers is "naturally more difficult" than serving 500. "The risk is that, as you grow, you lose that customer-centricity. The challenge is to keep the customer, rather than your processes, at the centre of things as you grow." PERSONALISATION n a world of digital innovation, customer expectations are increasing. Customers now expect to be able to contact their supplier at any time of the day and through any means. They also expect this contact to be personalised. Is achieving one-to-one personalisation a pipe-dream for energy suppliers? Most industry players don't believe so. But, they say, it will take a big shift in culture and mindset. Octopus's Jackson tells a story of a time when one of the big six wrote to him when he switched to Octopus. "Dear Customer, we'd love you to stay", read the letter. "They had my correct name on the bills but not on this most important message. If you can't personalise that, what chance do you really have of 1-2-1 personalisation? It speaks to cultural issues rather than technical – it's not a hard task but they couldn't get the organisation to care enough to sort it." Before embarking down the road of personalisation, it is important to understand the levels that customers actually want and then focus on delivering on these needs, rather than delivering wholesale personalisation for the sake of it. Mills says: "Delivering meaningful levels of personalisation can come with significant costs and complexity for your business, so as with all of our investment choices, we have spent time understanding where the delivery of personalisation will truly add value to our customers. We are then targeting our key investments in these areas." Today, thanks to devices and our ability to connect virtually all flavours of information, we find ourselves inundated with – so often frozen by – an abundance of intelligence Everyone agrees personalisation can be achieved, but does the technology exist which is required to achieve it? Scottish Power head of digital Craig Paterson says it does. The company – which supplies energy retail services to more than five million customers in the UK to achieve personalisation – has invested in real-time interaction management software. Before investing, it wrote a business case of between £1 million and £5 million, expecting to make this back over a three-year period. However, as well as seeing a 22 per cent uplift in retention, the company recovered all of its investment in just nine months. Thunderhead's Whyte insists unique customer journeys are not only feasible, but despite what many believe, customers expect to have things upfront. They don't require months of heavy-lifting and investment. "Many brands communicate with segments of one; connecting all available data, making sense of it all and through interpretation, injecting context into their customer conversations. This is 1-2-1 personalisation." He adds that the injection of AI is opening up new levels of complexity, understanding and nuance, but it's not a prerequisite for 1-2-1 personalisation. "We talk about customer journey "dictators" and "enablers" at Thunderhead. "Allowing customers to follow their own paths across their preferred channels – as opposed to brand-led, predetermined (dictated) campaigns – provides a level of personalisation that empowers energy companies to provide 1-2-1 experiences at scale right now. "Reviewing the businesses who work with Thunderhead, I'd say more than 40 per cent hadn't previously realised just how quickly they could be up and running, listening, visualising and engaging on a 1-2-1 basis, across all their touchpoints, in a matter of weeks. This is certainly no pipe dream." Smaller suppliers are prized with far more opportunity to benefit from positive growth and it is also true that smaller means more shared goals, and fewer divisions

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