Simple Energy advisor Todd Arnold spoke recently at a utility customer service conference in Texas, explaining that more rapid and frequent disruptive innovation technologies are quickly changing how utilities interact with their customers. “For utilities, your customer is always connected, always on. This connectivity is having a real impact because of the experience your customers are having … We are going to have to accelerate our capabilities. We need to rapidly accelerate our customer service.”
“How smart will your customers think you are? Whether we like it or not, our customers are forming new standards of excellence in customer services,” continued Arnold.
In this new era of customer service, utilities cannot afford to be perceived as an industry that is not smart enough to interact effectively with their customers. Expectations of constant connectivity on social media and simple applications that allow customers to easily understand and interact with their own energy use are becoming mainstream.
“You have to become obsessed with ‘easy,'” Arnold said. “When it comes to customer education, ‘easy’ trumps ‘education.'”
We agree that easy is essential – and part of making energy easy for people to understand is making the information interesting, fun and available on the social networks where people are already spending time. Learn more about making energy social, fun and simple, and check out further thoughts from Arnold and others in the full article.