How Can Utilities Enhance Customer Service with AI and ML Techniques?
November 12, 2021
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The era has changed, techniques of utilities towards handling the customers and improving relationships with them. Over the past few years, energy service providers or utilities have come a long way to adopt transformation in terms of optimizing the existing customer means of handling customers.
The new generation of digitally-minded customers are intelligent and expect higher values to their relationship with the company providing them assistance like electric, water, gas, and broadband utilities. For instance, customers nowadays want automated billing methods, fast resolution of issues. With advanced solutions and apps, more robust ways are coming out to provide customers with superior services.
And, whilst those efforts have had a wonderful effect on consumer pride stages in recent years, there are nonetheless paintings to be completed to expand wonderful consumer stories for all strength purchasers, such as millennials, lower-earnings purchasers, renters, and different critical subsets.
To expand a clearer photo of what today’s strength purchasers need from their strength carriers, the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) undertook 5 patron studies tasks at some point in 2018, such as deep dives into rising trends, information analytics, and virtual platforms, and 3 consumer subsets, lower-earnings purchasers, “selectively engaged” purchasers and small-and-medium commercial enterprise customers.
While those reviews protected a lot of topics, overarching topics started to emerge from the survey information on approaches that strength carriers may want to improve engagement amongst their customers. Earlier, a report published as “2019 State of the Consumer” report, which included over 5,500 survey responses, gives overviews of the important thing 2018 studies findings and highlights 5 of the maximum critical takeaways on enhancing the consumer experience.
Follow these steps to optimize the customer service experience for your utility company
Drive better customer programs
Customer programs are designed to establish communication with customers, listen to their concerns, explain to them the upcoming plans of companies, etc. To make a greater impact on them, try to personalize the customer programs. For this, conduct research and know what exactly your customers want and keep the programs confined to their issues. Adding unnecessary topics will only make the program lengthy and can make no impact on the customers.
Leverage innovative technology
Keeping pace with leading technology is crucial for every organization to gain a higher competitive advantage and remain in the game. Technologies like Artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, etc contribute to keeping any company progressive.
Utilize retargeting techniques
The journey of a lead converted into a customer is time-taking and comparatively long. Throughout this time, many visitors exit from the funnel without reaching the final stage. Similar to any other business, utilities too can perform retargeting and focus on solving the issues of those prospectuses.
Reduce upfront costs
Utility companies and every business should discover more effective ways to reduce upfront costs. You might don’t know but high upfront costs are one of the major hurdles for customers who belong to low income or moderate-income. That being said, collective research done by the experts demonstrates that even people with high income are not comfortable paying high charges as an upfront cost. Hence, energy providers must find low-risk ways to choose programs like on-bill financing and saving schemes.
Make enrollment easy for customers
Today, every one of us remains too busy nowadays. Likewise, customers or energy consumers don’t have much time to think about energy needs. But, that doesn’t mean folks are not interested in taking part in energy programs and signing up for these programs. This means utility companies can earn more numbers of loyal customers/members by making the enrolment process for programs easy. It should be less time taking and consist of simple steps.
How Does AriesPro Help Utility Companies to Improve Customer Service experience?
AriesPro is a leader in providing data analytics, IoT, machine learning, and cloud-based solutions to utility companies to keep them thriving in this digital era. In the context of improving customer services, the company presents a robust solution, UCRA. Let's explore more about this solution.
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The application, with its unique features, also encourages millennials, including long-term utility customers to utilize the advantages of customer service and other conveniences such as paying bills via online mode, access the usage tracking benefits, and other utility tools.
Conclusion
As the energy sector continues to evolve, strategies for effective consumer engagement are increasingly viewed as a cornerstone for energy providers who want to be successful in the new energy future. By listening attentively to what consumers want, energy providers can ensure that programs are designed to maximize participation, energy savings, and customer satisfaction.
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