Customer experience (CX) is becoming the defining competitive edge in the power and energy industry, surpassing even price and product. This calls for a holistic approach to managing all customer interactions—from initial awareness to post-service engagement. Moreover, with rapid digitalization and decentralization, energy companies face mounting pressure to enhance CX, increase brand awareness, maximize customer trust, and integrate disparate omnichannel contact center software.
Despite advancing technologies, a significant gap remains between customer expectations and real-world implementation of CX initiatives in the energy segment. To bridge this divide, contact center companies must focus on delivering proactive customer care, robust knowledge management, AI-driven personalization, and innovative customer service tools. The key to success lies in optimizing omnichannel CX strategies to ensure higher consistency and efficiency across all touchpoints.
How Can CX Providers Adapt to Emerging Energy Trends?
Frost & Sullivan unveils contact center customer experience (CX) initiatives and investment strategies of:
- Energy producers and distributors
- Oil and gas companies
- Water, electricity, and gas utilities
- Nuclear energy enterprises
- Waste management companies
- Along with best practices from leading providers like Five9, Genesys, and NICE.
As the industry navigates this transformation, CX providers must develop new strategies to keep pace with the following 8 imperatives:
- Disruptive Technologies
Delivering Proactive Customer Care: Customers increasingly expect more intelligent and responsive interactions with energy providers. As a result, providers feel the need to leverage contact center AI solutions and generative AI (GenAI) to enhance customer-facing and back-office operations. This will enable real-time outage notifications, energy consumption insights, bill warnings, usage alerts, preventive maintenance, and service updates.
- Transformative Megatrends
Fulfilling the Demand for “Cleaner Providers”: Driven by regulatory requirements, policy mandates, and the growing consumer demand for sustainability, organizations are accelerating efforts to shrink their carbon footprints. This is urging call center service providers to innovate with cloud-based solutions that are more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than traditional on-premises systems.
- Compression of Value Chains
Providing Self-Service Capabilities: As customers seek greater control and transparency in terms of energy usage, payment plans, and billing, the relationship between consumers, producers, and distributors is changing. This is necessitating advanced customer service tools, self-service platforms, and highly trained agents to manage complex technical customer inquiries, harness the power of data, and automate issue resolution.
- Internal Challenges
Focusing on Omnichannel Customer Experience: Energy organizations historically offered customer support through limited digital channels compared to other industries. However, the shift away from traditional voice and messaging toward emerging channels like video, mobile apps, and live chat is gaining momentum. To stay ahead, contact center companies feel the pressure of developing omnichannel customer experience solutions that integrate multiple communication touchpoints.
What steps is your organization taking to ensure that your CX strategy aligns with emerging megatrends in the power and energy landscape?
- Innovative Business Models
Customizing Workforce Management (WFM) Tools: Emerging business models like Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS), dynamic pricing, and blockchain-powered energy trading are reshaping the energy sector. As a result, CX providers must adapt WFM tools and strategies to meet these evolving requirements. Such personalization will also help providers optimize employee experience and engagement, thereby improving service delivery.
- Internal Challenges
Thwarting Growth Obstacles: Today, seven of ten energy organizations identify brand awareness and customer loyalty as their top CX priority. To support this goal, providers of call center services must develop innovative strategies and improved contact center software that circumvents common barriers that plague the energy industry—organizational silos, legacy systems, and dynamic regulatory mandates.
- Disruptive Technologies
Capitalizing on AI and Sentiment Analytics: Energy companies are gearing up to leverage real-time emotion recognition to tailor interactions based on a customer preferences, feelings, and sentiments. Going forward, providers who prioritize advanced contact center AI solutions, can supercharge virtual agents, chatbots, and customer service tools, thereby delivering more empathetic and personalized support.
- Industry Convergence
Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS: The ability for agents to seamlessly reach out to subject matter experts within the organization is particularly appreciated among energy organizations. As a result, providers are under increasing pressure to offer seamlessly integrated Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions with common admin portals and analytics.
In conclusion, as CX becomes the ultimate differentiator in the power and energy industry, contact center companies must embrace innovation, AI-driven personalization, and omnichannel customer experience solutions to stay competitive. The ability to bridge technological gaps and adapt to evolving customer expectations will define success in this dynamic landscape.
How is your organization preparing to lead the next wave of CX transformation in the power and energy sector?
Click Here to connect with Frost & Sullivan’s Contact Center and CX experts today for customized growth opportunities, best practices, technology strategies, and more!
