We were recently invited to speak at a closed industry conference where the top management of many of Sweden’s energy companies met to discuss thoughts and strategies around our new energy market. Watty was the only startup invited and we wanted to make sure that we got some people to come to our session — so we came up with the slightly provocative title for the talk “ ‘Digitalisation wont affect our industry’ — and other quotes from the decision-makers on a rapidly changing energy market”. It seems we struck a chord, the room was packed and people were standing in the back.
Rather than talk about our products and services we decided to focus on another story: the thinking we have encountered in the industry during 2.5 years of sales meetings with utilities all over the world. Here are some of the slides from the talk
This was the message of that talk:
- Selling kWhs is not a great business anymore
- That leads to the question — what else can energy companies do to add value to their customers?
- The utilities are not alone in asking themselves this, so are telcos, TV/network providers, retailers and many other.
- So what can utilities do that other companies cant? We believe their big advantage right now is that they already have a connected hardware installed in every customer’s home — the energy meter!
- The biggest unique opportunity for utilities is therefore in using customer data to add valuable services.
At one point one of the top decision makers (specifically responsible for innovation in fact) at one of the biggest energy companies in the world, told us “Digitalisation will not have any meaningful impact on our industry”. I was stunned by this statement. The difference between thinking digitalisation will have no effect, and our conclusion that it in fact is the most important aspect for their future, is hard to overstate. The fact that we are now being invited to be part of the conversations shows that the thinking is changing rapidly. Here are some of the strategies we believe will be effective in the coming years
- Open data
Make the customers data easy for the customer to access. That doesn’t just mean having a ‘Your account’ website, that means being able to export it to other services in a convenient way. If signing up with you (Utility A) means that the customer can make use of a number of other servies, your value proposition just improved significantly! - Integrate with the solution your customer love
This is the natural progression from point 1. Most if not all energy management products would be dramatically better if they had access to data that utilities today have. For example, pricing data is very cumbersome to input as a user, yet it is central for any energy management product. Especially if the user has variable pricing per day or hour, it will be nearly impossible to input, yet most smart control systems depend on it. Pro-actively seek out solutions that customers like and integrate with them. That gives their core user group a clear reason to choose you. A great example (though not technology related) was Skellefteå Krafts recent announcement that Tesla owners get free energy to drive, which gave them national press coverage, a great tie to one of the top brans in the world and a reason for a core group of users to choose them. - Partner and invest actively
Work and collaborate with companies that focus on making a certain part of the user experience great. This makes you flexible, makes you learn fast and it makes sense from the end-users perspective. A great example of this is EONs integration with Flic. That collaboration makes total sense for the end-user, whereas an EON smart button would be confusing, ‘why is my energy company selling me a button?’.
By investing in infrastructure that makes the most of customers data we believe utilities can build long-term sustainable advantages. This conclusion is clearly self-serving as we sell such services at Watty, but there are many other companies in this niche that offer different but viable alternatives to execute on this vision. Thanks for reading!
