Utilities expand customer-centric approach

ORLANDO — The customer is king and America’s electric companies have widened their customer-centric approach to develop and maintain strategies that enable them to continue providing customers with a 24/7, 365 days experience, while also addressing investors’ demand for growth, executives said at the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) Financial Conference here.

Panelists during the Monday panel session, “The Evolution of Customer Centricity,” discussed questions around why customer centricity matters to the utility industry, the capabilities that need to be developed in the industry going forward, as well as how customer centricity should be valued.

Customer segmentation, for example, has become an “absolutely required” component of customer centricity, according to the executives.

Duke Energy Corp. has determined broad segments of customers, including large industrial customers, small-medium business customers, governmental agencies, and residential, among others, all “having huge differences in needs,” said panelist Barbara Higgins, chief customer officer at Duke Energy.

“We found in our small-to-medium businesses, for instance, that we served some less well than others,” such as builders and developers and agricultural, Higgins said. “We were not doing as good of a job in these segments so, we had to dig to determine what are the things that are not necessarily performing well.”

Duke Energy has conducted further segmentation, as well, she said, and within those segments looked at some psycho-graphic data.

“But the most helpful data has been regular behavioral data,” said Higgins, like determining if a customer is a new customer that needs extensive assistance or a brand new customer that might simply need to be oriented in how to interact with the company; or a passive customer, meaning one who just needs the power turned on, or an actively engaged customer who has purchased additional products or services or subscribed to something else.

“We can look at each of these and then do more segmented services,” Higgins said.

Alex Santos, chief executive officer at Fortress Information Security, discussed the importance of customer data and how corporate America is utilizing customer data to better serve the customer and to protect customer data.

“When you talk about customer centricity, you think about what data can we use to make the experience better,” said Santos, adding that segmentation requires data to help improve and customize the customer experience.

“And customers clearly today … have an expectation of privacy,” he said. Therefore, security and privacy are the foundation to customer centricity and for establishing trust with the customer, Santos said.

“As we as an industry think about customer centricity, we have an opportunity because we’re starting with a clean sheet and we can learn from” other companies, said Santos, citing Google as an example, which he said is producing mass advertising on how customers can set their privacy controls for data protection.

First and foremost, he added, the utility industry should think about how to make security and privacy cultural in its customers’ centricity journey.

“I think that if we do that, then everything else will follow,” Santos said.

When it comes to the utility industry developing a truly customer-centric culture, Higgins said one challenge is to understand what customers really value and to attract them to your brand.

Another, according to Higgins, is investing in what customers value most, like human interaction, in-person opportunities to talk to someone, and even contact centers where customers may talk to someone on the phone.

“I would say this is the first industry I’ve been in that you have almost perfect data about people but an inability to do much about it, both from a practical standpoint — being able to fund it — but also from a regulatory standpoint,” Higgins said.

The best way to get around that challenge, she added, is to perform well so that regulators don’t think they have to protect customers from the utility.