Customer Journeys Enable Empowered Experiences

Helping Utilities Evolve from Reactive Service to Proactively Crafted Experiences

Posted From: Richmond, Virginia, United States

Customer Energy Series: Article 3

Before we get into the regularly scheduled post:

I’m bringing future posts to life with the help of your input. I’ve put together a quick survey (~6–8 minutes) to hear how you interact with energy.

👉 Take the survey here: https://forms.gle/RP6ewtcyphYy3D2E9

Topics covered:

1. What is a customer journey

2. Its benefits and use cases

3. Its impact on other parts of utilities

From Segmentation to Journeys

Utilities conduct segmentation to more effectively cater to the differentiated needs of various customer segments.¹ Enter customer journeys. Working with segmentation, customer journeys supercharge a utility’s ability to understand and deliver solutions to meet customers’ evolving needs.

Energy (in this context, electricity), is an enabling good - it’s not useful in itself, but rather in what it facilitates.² As utility customers, we care about the enabling good only for the outcome it affords. For example, electricity allows us to heat and cool our homes; what matters is the comfort we feel from the temperature in our homes, not the electricity itself!

Customers’ relationships with both the everpresent, enabling good (i.e., electricity) and their utility evolve as they "journey" through their lives. Moved to a new city? Setting up electric service is crucial; once completed, though, that journey won’t occur again until you move again.³ Some journeys, like bill payment, happen monthly. Others happen at random intervals that the customer and their utility may not be able to control, like outages. All residential customers have to start service, yet the way customers interact with their utility in this journey may differ greatly.⁴

Take the journey of “starting service” — the experience changes based on the customer undertaking it:

Ex 1: In college, I stayed in an off-campus house one year with five housemates; we were all on one utility account that was new. Given this, we had to make a downpayment of ~$200 to our local utility in order to start service, because of our lack of credit history.

Ex 2: When I signed up for my NYC service several years ago with ConEd, no downpayment was needed. My credit history had improved, so the utility altered my start service journey. This altered my interactions with the utility.

The customer journey is…

…a mapping of key experiences. This journey can vary based on:

• Scope: Does the journey focus solely on customers interactions, or does it include additional factors, like customers emotions?

• Stakeholders: Is the journey shown from the customer’s perspective, the utility’s, or both?

• Time: Is the journey mapping the current state, future state, or both?

Given these possible scenarios, I have seen customer journeys that are extremely comprehensive and others that are more barebones.

Common across customer journeys is the emphasis on representation through segmentation. Customer journeys showcase how one customer segment interacts with their utility. Instead of showing all residential customers behave in a similar manner, utilities use segmented customers within journeys.

It is important to note that customer journeys are different from traditional business or process diagrams. They do not show:

• Every possible path of action (e.g., flowcharts, process flows, or decision trees)

• A technology-based view of how customers interact with their utility

"Moments that Matter"

Take a second and think about your experiences with electricity; what journeys have you experienced? A few were discussed above; several more are illustrated in the image below. These are "moments that matter" for your relationship with your electricity provider. Each "moment" is really a distinct journey; journeys are core to customers' perception of their utility, and likewise, their relationship with electricity.

Revisit the experiences you have had; which were most impactful to you? These "moments that matter" are the place where utilities can begin honing in on a customer's experience with the utility.⁵ The utility may prioritize specific journeys that occur most frequently or those that are central to their business objectives.⁶

Segmentation (previous post) plays an important role in creating journeys. One customer journey can be created for an entire class (for example, all “commercial” customers). However, customer journeys becomes much more powerful when combined with customer segmentation.

As discussed previously, my NYC church has a very different engagement with ConEd than the local bakery and a huge hospital, even though they are all classified as “commercial” customers.

Even though they are all commercial customers, segmentation, such as by commercial industry, allows a utility to create a customer journey more tailored to a customer’s real needs and actions.

For instance, the aforementioned three customers engage with outages very differently: the church's focuses on comfort (especially on Sundays), the bakery cares about cost implications (especially during mornings), and the hospital operates life-critical functions (24/7).

So, why are customer journeys important?

Fact: Customers expect more from providers of all services, electric utilities included. With the ever-increasing capabilities of technology-centered companies (e.g., Amazon, Google), customers of all sizes expect utilities to provide service that improves. It is no longer enough for utilities just to have the lights turn on; customers now expect paying a bill to be easy, moving to be pain free, and receiving timely updates during an outage. Taking the first example further, we expect bill paying to be easy through many channels, like web and app; these payment channels did not even exist 30 years ago! Seemingly out of thin air, a utility must now provide services to customers that were previously not expected.

Therefore, delivering experiences that meet - and exceed - customer expectations are more important than ever. Mapping customer journeys allows utilities to first understand, and then deliver, these increasing customer expectations.⁷

The benefits extend further, for both utilities and customers. The table below describes benefits to both stakeholders along three areas: customer understanding, efficiency, and strategy + innovation.

How can utilities create customer journeys?

Journey maps are not created in organizational silos. To be successful, they must be created and used in conjunction with other utility activities. For example, journeys are most useful when combined with business objectives, such as increasing customer engagement, and segmentation (explored in the previous post). The figure below outlines a five step process; the latter three steps are explicitly about customer journey activities.

How Customer Journeys impact other utility activities

Customer journeys are a cornerstone to creating a customer-centric culture within utilities.⁸ Taking a step further, they provide critical information to the overall strategy and various operations of utilities.

One domain necessary for accurate customer journeys is the usage of data. Rather than imagining how a customer may act in a situation, utilities can use customer journeys to examine what actions customers really take. If an outage occurs…

• What channel (mobile, web, phone, text) does a customer interact with first?

• How quickly do they interact?

• How frequently do they check-back in?

With this insight, utilities can design experiences that match real customer preferences.

Furthermore, customer journeys increase the value of utility-wide transformation projects.

AMI (aka smart meters): Create opportunities for utilities to better understand their customers’ energy use. When this data is combined with customer journeys, utilities can better determine what products and services fit a customer's needs and wants. Without AMI, the utility would have a more difficult time creating a customer journey that is representative of actual customer needs. Once the utility implements the customer journey, the journey can then inform future marketing campaigns related to the product and service portfolio. Value increases, to both utilities and customers, as utilities successfully leverage transformation projects with customer journeys.

This concept also applies to a CIS upgrade or a CRM implementation; journeys provide the context and direction needed to guide system design and functionality. Most transformation projects benefit from utilities using customer journeys.

Case study: Outage reporting in Nebraska

Lincoln Electric System in Nebraska embedded customer journeys to understand the current experience of a group of anxious business customers (detailed here). What they found is the business customers put in a lot of effort, simply to report an outage! The utility mapped out the steps, and associated customer “emotions and behaviors,” to generate a comprehensive view of their customers' journey. Then, the utility designed a future state journey where outage reporting is much simpler.

The result? A future state where customers no longer needed to the utility at all. Instead, automation, through the use of customers' smart meters, eliminated customer effort altogether, increasing the satisfaction of the outage experience and uncovering new ideas for more operational improvements.

Mapping customer journeys allows utilities to create visibility and improvements for "moments that matter" across different customer segments. This empowers them to meet rising customer expectations and build operations that reflect a more customer-focused strategy.

In the next post, we will revisit a hypothesis from an earlier post: the adoption rate of Distributed Energy Resources.

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This is post 4 on Energy at the Edge.

Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of their place of employment.

AI was not used in this post.

Special thanks to Adam C for proofreading.

1. Adding complexity, the needs of these customer segments evolve over time.

2. Very similar to AI today.

3. Likewise with stopping service on a move.

4. Segmentation could proactively identify and investigate these differences.

5. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts still constitute the whole.

6. If all journeys mattered equally, the utility would not be able to effectively improve its customer interactions due to a lack of focus.

7. Remember from the first post in this series: a utility exists to serve electricity to all, yet they are not mandated in a way to prioritize the customer experience.

8. Similar to segmentation explored in the previous post.