Utility Week

24 www.utilityweek.co.uk/fLeX C O N S U M E R S C o n n e c t e d h o m e s e r v i c e s e idea of the "connected home" has gained a great deal of traction in recent years. Now, more and more utility companies are jumping on the bandwagon, and this is dramatically changing the way they are interacting with their customers. A r t i f i c i a l i n t e l l i g e n c e Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the biggest technological trends transforming every business sector across the world, according to a report by ResearchAndMarkets.com. e report claimed AI is being harnessed to develop innumerable smart applications that can efficiently take critical decisions autonomously and accurately, without human intervention. Uptake is beginning to creep into the utilities sector. In July last year, predictive field service management company Oneserve commissioned research that found a quarter of utility companies in the UK have integrated AI into their systems. What's more, a further 37 per cent have plans to follow suit in the next five years. Utility companies lose an average of £78,585 per year due to machine and system downtime, the research found. More than half of those polled said machine and system downtime had also led to a "serious negative impact" on customer loyalty and their company's reputation. Four in ten said AI will support the current utilities workforce, making it more efficient, cost-effective and customer-focused. is, and other, research would suggest using AI increases the productivity of the workforce by streamlining processes, reducing costs, and overall improving the customer experience – therefore leading to an increase in customer trust. However, these sorts of innovations are still in the early stages of development and are therefore "fairly blunt". "We're yet to see a good use of AI that starts to advise customers on their own personal energy or water usage," says Apadmi's Hadfield. " e financial sector is starting to get ahead here. Take Plum – the AI/chatbot app that analyses spending patterns and helps customers save more. It's not hard to see a future where energy advice – and even control – is delivered like this." Home services offer a truly promising prospect for energy suppliers to respond to increasing competition, as they allow suppliers "to differentiate themselves to keep customers" and "generate more revenues out of those who stay with them", according to Arthur Jouannic, principal analyst at Delta Energy, when he spoke to Utility Week in 2017. British Gas – the most established utility-home services provider in the market – has consistently seen its services division outperform its retail division both in terms of customer satisfaction and operating margin, despite a falloff in the market for boiler insurance products after 2013. Now, advances in mobile technology and data analytics, uptake of electric vehicles and the rollout of smart meters, mean that the gamut of home services suppliers can now offer reach far beyond the boiler installation and servicing products that British Gas has dominated for so long. Not only have other big six firms started to offer smart home technology, some of the larger challenger suppliers, such as First Utility, are also beginning to realise there are opportunities from offering the tech. In October last year, the company began offering free smart home products, for example the Google Home Mini smart assistant, to those signing up to its broadband packages. A recent Utility Week survey, carried out in association with Harris Interactive, found interest in smart technology is on the rise, and it is partly being driven by the uptake of smart meters. A third (31 per cent) of survey respondents said they were either "extremely" or "very" interested, compared with 26 per cent who expressed interest when the previous survey was carried out in June. Research from PwC last year found ownership of smart devices has more than doubled in the past two years, with households expected to spend £10.8 billion on smart tech in 2019. And the report indicated the growing market could be increasingly lucrative for energy suppliers in the future.

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