For utility providers to remain competitive and stable in a climate of continuing economic uncertainty accompanied by somewhat unpredictable regulatory change, gas, electric and water utilities must improve the way that they think about and use customer data.
Top of mind for many in the utility sector will be the need to accelerate the replacement of rigid and geriatric customer information systems (CIS). To remain relevant to consumers they need to add new capabilities that enhance the customer service experience and enable consistent, successful up-sell and cross-sell capability.
At the centre of the CIS is the customer record, connected to one or more accounts and a plethora of supporting transactional systems that embrace everything from IoT to outbound communication like marketing and billing.
While the account is heavily dependent on the metering systems, many of which are IoT-enabled, the reality is that the customer master is not so dependent. The customer master in particular, with its potential for a multi-account relationship, is more important from credit risk, service delivery, optimization and discounting perspective.
Consumers are cost conscious and they expect the utility provider to understand the whole relationship that they have with them. Accordingly, they want account managers and customer service personnel to recognise that even as consumers they have a multi-faceted relationship with the provider.
If you’re responsible for customer data management for a utility provider then consider how you deal with multi-site consumer customers and how you maximize the experience and minimize the risk.
Pike Research, a unit of Navigant’s Energy Practice, projects that transformational initiatives fuel growth in the electric utility billing alone and CIS software and services market, and that has led to expenditures in excess of $5Bn.
The utility sector has historically been encumbered with legacy systems that barely evolve, and are hard to implement and change. These systems are also expensive to maintain. Though IoT is changing things, one residual of legacy is that a great deal of the data exchange between smart meters, billing systems and the like, is undertaken in batch mode rather than in real-time. There is also often compartmentalization of business functions that actually hampers a holistic approach to dealing with customers resulting in an overall poor experience. This in turn leads to a higher cost to serve.
Consider what your goals might be for improving the situation with customer master data management as a utility provider, and consider too what the benefits are that a unified API-enabled search, retrieve, edit and update capability for the customer master might bring. They could be any or all of the following:
- Improved Reporting
- Improved data privacy and regulatory compliance
- Improved customer retention
- Improved customer acquisition
- Increased upsell and cross-sell
- Real time insights
- Real-time customer account self-service
- Easier integration
- An improved system and process support
- Reduced risk
Pretectum’s CMDM is a customer master data management system that allows your utility organization to bring data from disparate sources and consolidate views of the data in those disparate sources into a single unified platform where you can curate customer records, create relationships between the data silos and zone in on a golden nominal customer record with cross references.
As a single source of truth related to the essential data that defines the customer, the Pretectum CMDM can be used as a hub for the many spokes of your utility organization, serving the needs of Marketing, Sales, Risk and Compliance, Accounting and Billing and Service and Support. Contact us today to learn how we can help.