POWER July 2020 - 37

BUSINESS
transparency, transitioning together to a
zero-carbon energy future.
With this view, ENGIE gains a 360-degree
understanding of its customers,
and the capability to provide personalized
recommendations and collaborate
with customers on defining new solutions.
The company is able to proactively
manage customer relationships by setting
mutually agreed upon energy usage
milestones, and automatically triggered
alerts when nearing those thresholds,
to reduce energy consumption over the
next 50 years.
In France, a modern digital customerfacing
technology solution now provides
ENGIE customers with new self-service
conveniences. In addition to improving
customer service, these new omnichannel
capabilities have created a number of
important business efficiencies, including
a significant decrease in the average
number of calls and call duration for call
centers. Agent productivity has soared
and training time has been cut in half-a
significant benefit, given ENGIE's need
to train more than 2,000 agents on a
new platform. Emmanuel Fouché, Chief
Information Officer for ENGIE France,
said the new platform " revolutionized
ENGIE's customer engagement layer. "
These learnings and results contribute to
the company's global customer strategy.
Finally, ENGIE's commitment to a zerocarbon
future, enabled by an advanced
technology infrastructure, is attracting a
highly skilled workforce that will serve the
company far into the future. " Truly motivated
employees rally around their company's
business model, " said Le Gélard, who
sees employee engagement as critical to
customer success and is excited to find
potential employees attracted to ENGIE's
goals. " They are the human link between
your company and your customers. "
Digital Transformation Drives
Business Efficiencies
British Gas, the largest energy and home
services supplier in the UK, embarked on
its journey to digital transformation and
found that it not only improved customer
relationships, but also increased efficiencies
across the business. By adopting
a modern, cloud-based technology solution,
British Gas has lowered costs,
streamlined business processes, and
accelerated time to market for new offerings.
In the process, the energy supplier
significantly improved on a key pain
point: quotes that previously took three
days are now delivered in less than three
minutes-an outcome much more in line
July 2020 | POWER
with the high expectations of the company's
business customers.
In addition, modern cloud solutions
provide British Gas with crucial enterprise-grade
security, scalability, performance,
and availability-while also
providing a robust and agile base for industry-specific
applications, processes,
and technologies. This allows information
technology (IT) to move at the pace
of business and move toward delivering
unified, omnichannel customer experiences
at a fraction of the price of custom-built
or black box offerings. And it
lays a future-proof foundation for agility,
transformation, and disruptive innovation
without the significant IT and business
risks that come with custom solutions or
major changes to legacy systems.
For British Gas, and the entire industry,
the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the
importance of being prepared for whatever
the future holds and makes the flexibility
of a cloud platform a business necessity.
Good News for Enabling Customer
Strategies Industry-Wide
The power industry is well-positioned
to forge new and better customer relationships
thanks to three critical building
blocks that already exist.
Trust. Despite oft-cited Accenture
statistics about customers only spending
nine to 11 minutes per year thinking
about their utility, a recent survey by
the Smart Energy Consumer Collective
found that 78% of consumers in the U.S.
trust their utility and are more likely to
participate in a program or purchase a
product if their utility endorses it.
Customer Knowledge. Utility companies
are sitting on a treasure trove of customer
data. It's a golden opportunity to
gain greater customer insights, and tailor
products and services to better satisfy
customers. Other companies may have
considerable data about business or residential
customers' energy use too, but
the utility is still the source of the commodity,
usage data, and rates (Figure 2).
They have the opportunity to use their
advantage to benefit the customer, both
directly and through strategic (and potentially
revenue generating) partnerships.
Agile Digital Technologies. Modern,
cloud-based technologies are the key to
providing 360-degree customer views,
transparency into transactions, and the
means for creating relationships that will
allow for greater customer choice in a value-driven,
multi-dimensional energy market.
Digital operations are already driving
new investment in data-driven technolowww.powermag.com
2.
Vlocity's cloud and mobile software supports
commercial and industrial pricing and
quotation management through to order
capture for utilities and retail energy service
providers. Courtesy: Vlocity
gies, such as artificial intelligence, machine
learning, IoT sensors, and agile
approaches to improving operational and
maintenance efficiencies. All of which, in
turn, will continue to reinforce the shift
to the new partnership between energy
companies and their customers.
An Opportunity to Build Lifetime
Customer Value
ENGIE operates in competitive and
newly deregulated energy markets
across the European Union (EU)-markets
that by design and by necessity are
now driving investments in digitalizing
both customer and infrastructure operations.
Utilities, particularly in the U.S.,
where deregulation lags behind the EU,
are learning that even though they have
a mostly captive customer base, their
customers are
starting
to demand a
new relationship and a level of individual
personalization that they are used to receiving
as consumers. So, the need to
support digital transformation is just as
important-even if it is more challenging
due to the sheer size of the customer
base and the need to serve all segments
of their individual markets.
The bottom line, however, is that the
short-term pain is certainly worth the
long-term gain for customers and the
industry. The modern digital ecosystems
being created will increase transparency
and improve performance for utility
customers. This will ensure that they
will remain loyal and engaged. In turn,
empowered customers will inspire new
business models as utility companies
learn to quickly adapt to the changing
digital energy landscape.
The future for the utilities and power
industry will be shaped by those who
digitalize first and best. Power companies
have a window of opportunity to seize the
lead and shape this digital energy future. ■
-Kelly James is vice president and general
manager for Vlocity Energy & Utilities
(kjames@vlocity.com).
37
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POWER July 2020

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