Digitizing the Utility Customer Experience
Julie Marsh, Robert Simon, Loudscout.
TRANSISTOR

The first insight you need to understand is that all your customers, every narrow segment, is
already a digital customer of their bank, telco, other utilities, preferred retailers and the list
goes on. And 9 times out 10, they are getting a better experience with almost everyone than
they are with you.
The second most important thing to understand is that digitizing your customer experience
means positively affecting your operating costs, your ability to manage and communicate
with your customers and your ability to drive adoption of services or products that create a
stronger business.
Digitization means a developing new way of operating.
Drawing upon our independent research, workshops and extensive background in customer
experience, we have developed a foundational model for any utility looking to chart the
course to stay relevant, be more effective (and competitive) as a digital customer centric
organization. So what you’ll find inside our guide called, Transistor, is a way to get the
planning process started immediately, to determine what you are going to need as a
marketing organization to build out, manage, and operationalize a lot of change.
Reality Check
Your customers
are already
DIGITAL
customers.

Competitive Scan: Finland
The biggest mistake you can make is to digitize the way
things are done today. Which is pretty much what
everyone does and why no one is happy with the
results.

Here are a few grounding points on
Customer Experience:
Whenever leadership starts talking about the customer
experience everyone nods their heads, gets a little
charged up and then Googles it. Because, well, we’ve
never seen leadership be exactly clear on what they
mean by customer experience and want they expect to
achieve by focusing on it.
1. A customer-centric company places the customer at the center
of its planning capabilities to deliver on what customers want
above all other priorities within their organization. This is so true
for a utility, whether we are talking about generation or
distribution, people need energy and everything you do should be
in service of that needs that.
2. Customer experience means enterprise level technologies and
long-cycle projects to get them stood up and talking to each other.
This is what finance thinks when they hear the CEO say customer
experience, “We are going to need lots of capital and new
partners.” And they are 100% correct.
3. Corporate culture and the behaviors it values and incentivizes
are going to need to change, dramatically. Departments are going
to share their plans for a customer segment, they are going to talk
to customers, find and build solutions for them and measure their
effectiveness at influencing customers and drive operation success.
Yeah, change.
Direct Impacts from the customer experience

Before you started learning and thinking about our functional customer experience model, here’s a quick checklist
to give you a sense of where you are at today and allow you to determine what needs to change in your
organization.
Keep this definition when going through the checklist:
A customer-centric company places the customer at the center of its planning capabilities to deliver on what
customers want above all other priorities within their organization.
1. Your website and mobile capabilities report up into IT or Operations.
2. Marketing’s role is to drive conservation and issue coupons.
3. You have a trove of primary research and customer information but not a single segment owner.
4. Your website is non-transactional and you rely on 3rd parties for anything useful, like paying a bill.
5. Feedback from the field or CSRs is not sourced for making a better digital experience.
6. No one has responsibility/accountability for measure digital success.
Yes No Maybe?
6 yes = a hard reset is in order. 4 yes = It will take few years but we can do this. 2 yes = Let get this done.
Checklist for the work ahead

You and your customers live in a known but not necessarily predictable context. You know
they are going to consume energy and can roughly forecast how much with enough data
but you can’t predict the behavorial things that are going to change that consumption.
Nor can you easily predict the macro environmental and political forces that disrupt
everything with regulations, outages, you name it.
How to get started
And it needs to be simple. This will become your
common, shared framework to be used as a planning
tool across the organization. So again, it needs to be
simple.
The best place to start is by identifying the key
influential episodes within the customer experience
and mapping them to our framework so you can see
where and how you need to take action.
Always thinking about the customers end goal,
identifying these moments, will help you begin to
understand the strategic priorities from which to begin
to build the foundation of the customers experience and
is an essential step in creating a better customer
experience.
Our point is, you are going to need a
framework to map what your customer is
going to experience over time, versus, your
ability to service and deliver.

Transistor: The Customer Experience Framework
We’ve looked across a broad spectrum of activities and needs across a years worth of interaction between a
utility and its customers and we’ve drilled it all down to 4 experience pillars where utilities can positively impact
customer satisfaction and facilitate sustainable change towards a better customer experience.
RECOGNITION
Where you prove that
customers are more than
just a bill:
Focus on: New Customers
- Renewals - Outreach
VALUE
Where you prove that your
customers are more than
just a bill:
Focus on: Call Center -
High Bill - Self Service -
Conservation Advice
INNOVATION
All the things you are doing
to lessen Impacts and drive
reliability:
Focus on: Meter
Technologies - Usage
Report & Analytics - Peak
Day Alerts - Environment
Compliance
IMPACTS
Things that happen to the
customer that are almost
never positive:
Focus on: Rate Changes -
Outages - Extreme
Weather

Competitive Scan: Finland
Ok, let’s make this tactical and practical. Let’s take the
Experience Framework and apply it to three worksheets
so we can get a sense of what customer centric
planning looks like.

Worksheet #1 The Pillars
Recognition
What are the opportunities where customers interact with
your brand/organization where you can recognize them in
moments that are most meaningful to them (hint, this isn’t
the moment they pay their monthly bill, although making it
easier for them is certainly a step in the right direction -
that’s a freebie the Value column).
This worksheet is designed to start to uncover opportunities against the 4 key principle phases, Recognition,
Value, Impacts and Innovation. It is intended to start broad, so you can begin thinking about your objectives
and extracting the critical opportunities to focus on, strategies to get you there and measure.
Value
• What are the opportunities where you can removing constraints
that prevents your customers from receiving the most value
from the service, products, programs available to them. In
utilities today this equates to giving the customer control, over
the things they have the ability to control like self-service,
energy usage and consumption.
• What are the moments you can intersect to help service the
customer before they have to come to you.
As a Utility you are in the business of solving problems. What problems will you solve for
your customers? What problems do they currently face? What problems will they face?
How will you enhance the customer experience through the four key principle phases?

Worksheet #1 The Pillars
Impacts
• When it comes to impacts, misinformation, no
information, and lack of advanced information are
typically responsible from a customer having
reasonable expectations in the service and reliability
of their utility, to quite simply, not wanting to be
your customer.
• Impacts is about striving to overcome the barriers
that inevitably exist to avoid leaving your customer
feeling dissatisfied and unfavourable towards the
utility, products and services.
• How can you influence the impacts of these outside
factors to minimize disruption to the customer?
Innovation
• How are you going to learn,
grow and solve problems
together to create a sustainable
long-term relationship?
• How are you technology and
infrastructure investments of
value to the customer now?
Strategies & Measures
• In broad strokes, how are you going to
get there: People, process and
technologies.
• How will you measure your success?

Segment
[New Customer]
Opportunties Strategies Measures
Recognition What are the most
valuable moments we can
engage with and
recognize New
Customers?
• New Customer
• Renewal
• Outreach
How do we want to get there?
• Create meaningful interactions with the
customer
• Organize around the needs of new customer
• Provide multi-channel engagement
opportunities to
inform, educate and engage
How will we measure your
success?
• Activation of new programs
Value
Impacts
Innovation
Worksheet 1 - Pillars Across Segments [Sample]

Episodes are customer experience touch-points a customer will encounter
with their Utility. Identifying them starts with knowing what your customer
values, identifying those moments and leveraging them at the right moment to
enhance the customer experience.
In the Worksheet #2 example, we’ve used Recognition from our Customer
Experience Framework as the core principle and “New Customer”, “Renewal”
and “Outreach” as our example of identified opportunities from Worksheet #1.
The purpose of this worksheet is to identify the Episodes of engagement that
can influence customer satisfaction and improve customer relationships;
directly impacting the customer experience.
Leveraging these opportunities can substantially alter a customers
perception of their Utility and how they engage with their Utility;
including enrolling in additional programs.
Worksheet #2 - Episodes
Episodes are where
customers interact
with your brand /
organization.

RECOGNITION Opportunties Strategies Measures
New Customer What are the most valuable
moments we can engage with and
recognize New Customers?
• Account creation
• First bill
• High Bill Alert
• Service change
How do we want to get there?
• Leverage inbound calls to drive action
and simplify the process
• Provide relevant information to the
customer before the customer has to
come to us via brand.com, email or
social media
How will we measure our success?
• Decreased calls volume to customer
service (increased self-service)
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Web Analytics - KPI’s (Impressions,
Conversions)
Renewals
Outreach
Worksheet #2 - Episodes: Recognition* [Sample]
*Note: we’ve used “Recognition” as our core principle & “New Customer” as our opportunity) in the Example, but all 4 principles will have their own
worksheet with your identified opportunities to link “Key Moments”to.

Worksheet #3 - The Playbook
The Playbook is about identifying actionable tactics across channels that
can provide direction that can unlock substantial value and create a better
customer experience. Worksheet #3 has a sample set of tactics against a
handful of channels against the opportunities we identified in Worksheet
#2 for Call Centre, brand.com, E-Mail and Social Media.
Completing a playbook worksheet can really give a team a realistic sense
of what needs to happen against each and every identified episode. It will
also help provide clear insight into what tactics will differentiate you in the
eyes of your customer.
The best way to approach The Playbook is to choose a Pillar (in our
sample we’re chosen Recognition) and work down through the list of
episodes, such as, New Customer, High Bill etc…
Everyone Utility knows
they need to win with
the customer.
The questions is how,
exactly?

RECOGNITION Call Center brand.com Email Social Media
New Customer • Proactively signing new
customers up for self-
service through their
Account.
• Auto enroll in paperless
billing
• Leverage Interactive
Voice Prompt for
inbound callers to
introduce and promote
programs and services
i.e. paperless billing,
convey benefits and
encourage opt-in
• Educate how to and
benefits to view their
bill online
• Home Page Promotional
support with CTA to
encourage voluntary
opt-in to i.e. paperless
billing / registration
highlighting the
benefits that resonate
with customers
• Inform, educate,
encourage enrolment -
new products & services
• Receive notification when
their bill is ready
• Receive notification when
payment is due
• Receive overdue alerts
• Inform, educate, drive traffic
to brand.com - to enrol in
new programs & services
•
• Promotional support
with CTA to drive
traffic to brand.com
to encourage
voluntary opt-in to
paperless billing /
registration
highlighting the
benefits that resonate
with customers -
convenience, ease of
use etc.
• Inform, educate, drive
traffic to brand.com -
to enrol in new
programs & services
Renewals
Outreach
Worksheet #3 - The Playbook

The Last Step - Gap Analysis
A Gap Analysis helps us reimagine, reprioritize, reset the customer
experience and will help guide you from where you are to where you want
to be. It is a simple, yet effective way to organize your strategic objectives
based on the present situation and the desired future situation. Action
items are then documented based priority and how you plan to achieve
your vision and goals for a clear operating model that is aligned with
operation priorities. There are 3 key questions we can ask ourselves to
organize our strategic objectives and priorities based on our current state
and desired future state.
1 - What are the opportunities available to us, new or one’s already being
done that can be approved upon?
2 - What steps and timing will we work towards to achieve our Future Goal
State?
3 - What action, people, process and technology do we need to be able to
deliver a great customer experience?

Building Towards a Digital Transformation
Once you’ve completed all 3 worksheets and the Gap Analysis you should
have a fairly good idea of what capabilities you want to invest in and the
gaps in terms of people, processes and technology.
At the core of creating a positive customer experience is starting with a
sound strategy that always starts with the customer.
• Drive business objectives by taking a customer-centric approach
• Frame the development of all experiences under a framework that leverages
customer insights (analytics + customer feedback), best practices, and institutional
knowledge.
• Create mobile-first product design that focuses on balancing the needs for the
utility and findability to satisfy the customers needs
• Remove barriers, create clear, unobstructed paths towards programs and guidance
content
• Test and optimize as required.

Loudscout is a customer experience agency led by a
group of content strategists, user experience and
digital consultants who, over the last fifteen years,
have been at the forefront of experience disruption
We’re experts in
customer experience
transformations.Through design based thinking we connect the
digital world to the physical experiences of your
brand. We deliver on strategic planning, omni-
channel campaigns and content that lives across
optimized websites and channels.
New York | Toronto | Vancouver | www.loudscout.co hello@loudscout.co