Digitally savvy customers expect proactive and personalized services across all channels, and the utility industry is no exception. Consumers want to engage with utility providers just as they interact with service providers across other sectors. They expect access to utility services to be as seamless as accessing banks, restaurants, clothing brands, or social media platforms- with just a click of a button on their mobile phones.
It is imperative for utilities to meet dramatically evolving consumer expectations around seamless interactions via digital channels and intelligent self-service to unlock higher consumer satisfaction and cost efficiencies. Inconsistent customer service makes it difficult for utilities to control costs and ensure customer satisfaction. The critical challenge facing utilities is the lack of smart digital channels to engage with customers and meet their rapidly changing requirements. Utility providers need an omnichannel solution that streamlines and strengthens customer service operations to help them remain customer-centric and deliver more proactive and personalized services.
Roadblocks in Digitizing Customer Experiences in Utilities
Today, customers prefer to interact with their utility providers via multiple channels and want more convenience and control over how they are contacted. Moreover, with the advent of intelligent technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), it has become critical for utilities to focus on optimizing customer journeys to keep customers loyal, satisfied, and engaged.
Let us look at some of the key challenges that push utilities for customer experience (CX) transformation.
Lack of Omnichannel Platform for Connected Customer Journeys
Existing traditional customer service systems impede seamless customer experience due to inconsistencies arising from fragmented processes and disparate systems. Digital CX transformation ensures an omnichannel platform with new digital channels of customer support, mobile applications for easy access, complete visibility, and better productivity of field workers.
Pressing Need for Automation with Minimal Touchpoints
Cumbersome manual and paper processes hamper the productivity and efficiency of the workforce while gathering real-time consumer feedback or addressing customer grievances. Automation coupled with RPA, AI, and ML, enables the wide-ranging application of intelligent automation across the enterprise. Furthermore, automated self-service interactions via bots play a pivotal role in creating service differentiation and give a competitive edge in the highly competitive utility sector. Automated processes also represent a significant opportunity for improvements in cost reduction.
Increased cost pressures in traditional CX methods
Most utility companies are under constant pressure to optimize costs and operate more efficiently. In a traditional customer service setup, it is essential to identify high transaction costs, coordination costs, among other costs, to lay down a plan for efficiency. Automation provides cost efficiency that translates to end value for customers. CX transformation facilitates the implementation of sound, cost-effective customer service management.
Leveraging Tech Mahindra’s Connect-U to Revamp CX
What is Connect-U?
Tech Mahindra’s Connect-U is based on SAP conversational AI and RPA and is designed for utilities to enrich the customer experience and provide a contactless service. It aims to redefine customer experience with minimum touchpoints, decreased cost, increased NPS scores, efficiency, loyalty, and reach. It is an RPA-based solution that integrates SAP CAI, AI, IRPA, AI, BTP, AI Business service, S/4HANA for utilities.
With an unwavering focus on enriching the customer experience and strengthening the services, Connect-U redefines utility customer experience using unexplored channels for tier 1 and tier 2 global power, water, and gas utilities striving to redefine the customer experience.
Plugging Connect-U into the customer experience ecosystem empowers utility providers to ensure:
- Greater reach enriched with RPA and contactless service
- Value-driven approach to automation
- Drastic improvement in convenience and reduction in response time
- Live chat preference for customer service over new-age channels
- Cost efficiency translated into end value for customers
- RPA driven Meter to Cash
- Integrated Works Management
- AI/ML driven Sentiment Analysis
- End to End Demand Response Management
How Connect-U Boosts Customer Experience Transformation
With growing customer preference for digital and self-service interactions, seamless customer experience now plays a pivotal role in creating service differentiation. To become truly customer-centric, utility providers must offer customer services across all channels to provide customers with ease of choice and ensure maximum reach. Connect-U offers next-gen consumers availability, simplicity, and flexibility.
Following are the key features of Connect-U that are enabling utilities to transform their customer experience:
- Out-of-box Integrations: Standard out-of-box integration with SAP BTP components ensures better extensibility and scalability than various customized non-SAP products that fail in terms of offering easy integration with SAP and non-SAP systems. It is an effective solution for utilities using the SAP-integrated solution stack. Moreover, it also provides technology agnostic Rest and Odata service-based integration.
- Increased Automation via RPA: RPA based chat engine channel is one of the most influential and swift channels for utility customer service. Connect-U automates customer service with zero touchpoints and improves response time using the chat messenger channel. Additionally, it provides synchronized bot-to-human handover and RPA-based consumer indexing to increase efficiency as well as nullify the hard work from utility customers’ lives.
- Built-in Customer Feedback and Sentiment Analysis: Connect-U inculcates customer sentiment analysis and feedback for a guaranteed satisfied customer experience. Utility service providers can leverage such capabilities to deliver personalized services to their customers to ensure better satisfaction and loyalty while reducing churn.
Envisioned Benefits:
- Automated Service with Zero Touch Points
- Live Chat Preference for Customer Service over New-age Channels
- Massive Reach & Convenience and Reduction in Response Time
- Improved Customer Loyalty via Personalized Services
- Increased Efficiency via Automation
- Reduced CX Cost
- Improved NPS Score with a Reduction in Churn
Looking Ahead
As the utility industry continues to change fundamentally, CX will become the key differentiator and the reason for affinity towards specific service providers. Tech Mahindra’s Connect-U is focused on offering an amalgamation of seamless integration across the CX ecosystem and a futuristic vision to bring in customer-centricity from all perspectives. It provides a personalized experience using next-generation unexplored channels to ensure convenience and response in near real-time. It strives to provide zero touchpoint experience using technologies, including RPA, AI, ML, NLP, and many more.
Build lasting relationships, improve productivity, increase revenues, and revamp overall customer experience with Tech Mahindra Connect-U. Contact our CX transformation experts today!
About the Author
Pawan Khilari
Principal Product Manager, Global E&U Practice Head -ANZ, Tech Mahindra
Pawan is leading strategic products and offerings for Tech Mahindra in Energy & Utilities and enterprise space involving customer experience, intelligent enterprise, asset intelligence, smart metering, and distributed energy resources solving real life problems with empathy driven and product led design approach.
His expertise in utilities domain includes digital transformation, smart metering(AMI), AI/ML, blockchain, IoT, DER, asset management, customer experience, know-how of the regulatory regime as well as operating processes performed by various market participants in the EMEA and ANZ regions.
Pawan has been a Certified Product Manager and Design Thinking Innovation Champion building more than 10+ innovative product and solutions in E&U and enterprise space. One of his Innovation incubations has won an SAP HANA Innovation Award in 2015.
