Conjuring a customer relationship: the networks’ chalenge

Nicola Eaton Sawford explains why distribution network operators have to ditch the idea of being "invisible utilities".

We missed a trick didn’t we? When the energy markets opened to competition so many years ago and energy business separated retail/supply from distribution, we had an opportunity to explain to customers which company would be doing what.

But that didn’t happen. Instead the distribution businesses headed off into the shadows hoping to be the “invisible utility” they convinced themselves customers wanted.

But reality is that even if that was what customers wanted, it is not what they needed.

If we accept that customers rarely need their energy distributor, then maybe it’s OK for them to be invisible, provided that when they are needed, they are easily found.

But for many years that wasn’t the case – often their contact details were not in the places customers would expect to find them. Accessing distributors became a chore, a negative start to any experience and if we’re talking about an energy supply failure; a negative experience at the beginning of a negative experience. Not good.

Of course over the years, changes in technology and particularly channels have meant almost any organisation can be googled and a variety of contact details found. In this day in age customers’ will find contact details and choose the channel, making contact patterns unpredictable and hard to manage.

So, given that it is impossible for distribution organisations to remain “invisible” going forward, what position should they now adopt to customer engagement?

Smart metering is an excellent opportunity to educate customers while their interest in energy is raised. Too high a proportion of customers still do not know who to contact in the event of an energy problem.

Before we start creating whizzy apps and Twitter personas, let’s do some of the nuts and bolts stuff, there are simple solutions to some of the long standing problems.

Technology provides fantastic tools for organisations to be proactive. Distribution companies cannot hide behind the excuse that they no longer hold customer data and even if they did it would be prohibitively expensive and hard to keep up to date. So don’t hold it – buy it on demand. We have already implemented processes that ‘grab’ telephone number data for customers in the area of an outage and proactively message them in a matter of just a few minutes.

It can be done, the customer experience thinking exists out there and the technology is there, distribution companies just need to develop the will to fully exploit it.

Working with energy connection businesses we find over half of customers taking an indirect route to the distributor, because they simply don’t know who to go to. When customers take an indirect route, they are influenced by what they are told by the third parties they speak to and consequently perceive the process to be unnecessarily high in customer effort.

There is no way on earth Andy Street would agree to John Lewis hiding down a back street, with their only known access is through Debenhams, where the staff they encountered might tell them “John Lewis are not good value for money. They will make you wait forever at the till.”

But this is what happens in the energy connections business, a semi-competitive market, where builders, trades and energy suppliers are influencing customer perceptions before distributors even get to speak to them and lay the foundations for an awkward customer relationship.

The concept of an ‘invisible distribution business’ has to be consigned to history, it just isn’t possible. Distributors have customers – they always have had, all day every day, everyone connected to them is a customer. They also have prospective customers and need to embrace the idea that sales and marketing is a key role within their connections businesses.

For many people in distribution businesses this customer experience stuff is fluffy and uncomfortable. It is not their natural focus. Those people need to be helped to adapt, so they can connect with the customer experience, attune to customers and recognise how their decision making can effectively balance the needs of customers with those of the operation. Because, like it or not, customers will not go away and increasingly expect more from their experiences.