By Grant de Leeuw, General Manager Europe, TALKINGTECH

Never has there been such an exciting time to be involved in the payments industry, with new innovations for both customers and businesses launched almost every week it seems. Gradually we’re witnessing some of those technologies being adopted by the UK’s utility providers – the ‘Big 6’ have reputations to maintain and more importantly, improve, and the smaller suppliers have an exciting opportunity to differentiate from their early days onwards through digital services.

Digital transformation is abound and as the focus so far has mainly been on improving products and services, I think there’s much more to do to unify the entire customer journey and experience.
Arguably, customer experience is more important in the utilities sector than any other. Asa highly-regulated industrywhere what comes out of the tap, cable or pipe is the same, it’sprice, service and experience are that are the differentiators.

In a 2013 Capgemini Consulting report, entitled ‘So Near Yet so Far – Why Utilities Need to Re-energize Their Digital Customer Experience’, EU suppliers said enhancing the customer experience and retaining customers rated second and third of the top business challenges they face, with regulatory compliance at the top of the list.

How utility suppliers behave has been well and truly under the microscope for the last few years – ‘doing right by the customer’ is now fully expected by consumer advocacy groups, the regulator and consumers. Those adopting a consumer-centric approach as a critical part of their drive to retain and grow their customer base are slowly seeing results.

Personalisation is a core part of the business improvement journey because the communications brands generate and the payment options they offer go hand-in-hand. And further than that, we know a single approach to payments no longer works – in fact it’s now more problematic – for businesses and customers in today’s consumer-centric world. In a 2013 JD Power Electrical Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, customer satisfaction increased by 42 points when customers could select their own payment method.

The payments channel is often viewed as something which produces purely transactional contactswith the customer, and what a missed opportunity! It actually generates the greatest and most frequent contact points that you have with each customer.Long term, a superior customer experience including robust procedures for facilitating bills with regular payments, ad hoc and overdue payments (and helps prevent the latter) will add value. Doing so willdecrease customer churn, increase customer satisfaction, improve business efficiency and generate revenue earlier in the collections process than usual.

Our recent work for EDF Energy involvedcreating a range of easy, convenient payments channels so that customers could avoid any unwanted consequences from outstanding balances on their bills. We created an anticipatory strategy which included a two-stage reminder before an account became overdue, SMS and self-service payment channels for due payments and further reminders to encourage settling before a more formal process started. As a result, 67% more cash was generated for bill payments just four days after work on a 3,000-size control group started. Importantly, 76% of customers agreed that the customer experience improved.

How should organisations transform their ongoing customer experience? Start by considering how you like to be treated as a customer; secondly find out howyour competitors do things; and lastly research next-generation customer journeys in other industries like retail and travel. Then create and provide the most consistent, manageable levels of service and capabilities that you can. In addition, draw up a roadmap for future improvements to give each department a focus and understanding of the overall direction the business should take.

For utilities providers, sentiment is ‘almost’ everything these days. If a company treats its customers with genuine care and honesty at each interaction, reduces the effort and time customers need to take and helps them when there’s a problem, then it’s much more likely to receive a cumulative, positive response and go some way to increasing brand reputation in the long term. Is your organisation tracking customer sentiment using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) framework? Even more exciting is the relatively recent addition of the NPS2 methodology, which focuses on the specific experience at various stages of the customer journey and feeding that back into the business. It really strengthens the idea of 360 degree feedback loop between company and customer.

An important final consideration is whether your organisation is confident that it holds a single view of the customer, which includes the payments process. Enhancing and constantly refining touchpoints at every stage of the customer lifecycle, making use of multiple channels and a commitment to inputting learnings and preferences from the data you gather about your customers will play back into the personalisation process in a cycle that improves over time.

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