Whether your consumers are of the mass-market variety or commercial and industrial, there’s an expectation that their engagement with their energy and utility company will be as fast, simple, and seamless as those engagements with major consumer brands. Consumers expect personalised digital engagement, including web-based and mobile customer services, 1-to-1 offers based on individual energy consumption, advising customers on optimising energy costs, managing their in-home energy resources, and active social media engagement.
A Safe Channel
Yet in these days, where scams and fraud are rife, the more traditional ‘digital’ engagement methods of email and SMS are increasingly being ignored. Trust has been eroded.
Where smart companies are moving to is investing in digital enablement platforms. These are platforms that allow your consumers to self-serve to a degree with traditional and advanced functions. They also enable you to more specifically tailor and personalise offers and messages to consumers, leveraging the deep analytics within the platform. The security that is embedded within it means you and your customers can be assured that any messages are completely legitimate.
Hansen Self Service Portal
At Hansen, our Hansen Self Service Portal allows enables our customers, whether they are engaging with the mass market or commercial and industrial sectors, to provide very tailored energy solutions to their customers.
How? By integrating customer data, energy consumption patterns, consumer energy resources and predictive analytics to offer more personalised energy management services. These range from traditional self-serve functions to more advanced virtual power plant widgets and energy-saving recommendations.
The result – increased energy efficiency on the customer’s part and greater customer satisfaction, helping consumers make informed decisions about their energy consumption. Insights leverage data analytics to offer actionable intelligence, enabling utility companies to create more effective and personalised engagement strategies.
Layering in a digital enablement platform doesn’t mean you need to stop using your other communications and marketing methods. On the contrary, taking an omni-channel approach to digital engagement just further boosts your propensity to improve loyalty and lower churn.
Power in Partnerships
Hansen’s SDK creates opportunities for co-development among our product teams worldwide, promoting innovation and ensuring our solutions address the diverse needs of our global customers. Moreover, we offer advanced features for customers facing hardship and requiring payment plans, helping them access essential services without undue stress. As more customers embrace digital solutions, it helps maintain a balanced ratio of customer service agents to customers, with an increasing number of customers opting to self-serve over time.
Where we see the best results is when companies encourage customers to engage and interact with them across web, mobile, and social media, and jump into the platform for the last piece of the puzzle – to confirm a new offer.
If taking your digital customer experience to the next level is something you want to learn more about, reach out to me or any of the team here at Hansen.
Nick Nikolitsis
Product Director, Energy
Hansen Technologies