Renewable Energy Customer Experience (RECX)

Over the past 5 years we’ve watched the energy industry be driven by technological change, rising competition and evolving legislative frameworks, all requiring the deployment of more customer-centric technologies.

At WePower, we have met many power companies, across the world, who have recognized the need for digital transformation. These early adopters are fundamentally rethinking their business models, redefining how they can better serve and interact with their customers, and mitigating risks associated with the changing landscape of energy.

At the same time, energy is a particularly slow-moving industry when it comes to adopting new approaches. Investments tend to be highly capital-intensive, there are complex regulatory requirements, and power retailers and utilities often don’t know where to start their transformation or innovation process.

Understanding how digitizing your energy processes creates added value for customers will put you at the forefront of the energy industry, but you’ll also need a strong approach to guiding the customer experience. Defining your customer’s journey in renewable energy procurement will ensure your customer is guided through the process, helped through unforeseen organisational bottlenecks and delivered the best products and services for their business.

Know your customers

The energy industry as a whole sees its customer segments through three key groups; Commercial and Industrial, Small/Medium businesses, and residential. These groupings are typically based on consumption. With the advent of renewable energy and decentralization of generation assets referred to as Distributed Energy Resources (DER), all three groups can be their own generators. As such, the key to enabling a successful customer experience is to provide intuitive, digitised solutions for each step of the journey.

What is the Renewable Energy Customer Experience Journey?

With digitisation comes new renewable energy products, many of which your customers may be unaware of. Guiding your customer through the customer journey, from start to end, is the key to a higher sales success rate. The five phases in the journey are awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Though these are general phases in any customer journey, a digitised energy management platform can make each step of the journey easier for yourself and your customers.

Awareness

The discovery stage, pre-sales, is an opportunity to draw your customer’s attention to your innovative energy products. First, you must understand how your products meet your potential customer’s current and future needs.

Energy technology is novel and exciting, but also drives companies to use additional caution in the purchasing process. Connect with your potential customers around their vision and develop clear messaging around how your innovative products are already working in line with what their customers want and need.

Consideration

When your potential energy customers consider your product they are driven by their needs and their awareness and understanding of your brand. Remember that features are secondary to the functionalities of your products that directly solve their problems.

If your brand is new to the market, be sure to magnify awareness around your partnerships, thought leadership and use-cases of how your innovative digital energy products are exceeding the goals of your current customers.

Purchase

Don’t leave your customer waiting once they’ve made the purchase. Meeting their immediate needs shows that you’re supportive of their business goals from day one.

Don’t leave a long void between purchase and planning deployment. Acknowledge and celebrate your new customer and set a positive tone for the relationship, moving them forward into further phases.

Retention

It’s far more cost effective to maintain your current customers than find new ones. Retaining a customer can be difficult if support and guidance are not integral parts of the process. When customers feel insufficiently supported, their relationship with your brand changes, putting your reputation and ability to up-sell at risk.

In technology, a customer feels unsupported when their expectations of understanding and learning the technology are not met. Ensure you have a customer success team and relevant training available to support your customers to help them to on-sell the benefits of energy technology to their own customers.

Maintain customer satisfaction by continuing to solve their problems and keeping lines of communication clear. Anticipate your customer’s future hurdles and outline steps to avoid bottlenecks in sales. Make your customer’s needs your top priority.

Advocacy

If all of the previous phases are handled correctly, your customers will become your biggest advocates. Publicise their use-cases and their testimonials to influence their peers and competitors to consider your products. And when your customers recommend your products to others be sure to make the benefit mutual. Reward your customers for sharing their experiences with your brand and products to create a customer culture where loyalty and mutual reciprocity are at the core of each relationship.

Selling the benefits of Energy Technology to customers

From smart metering to tracking Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scopes 1, 2 and 3, energy technology is the future of all energy, not just renewable energy. In the future, your customers (and potential customers) will all interact with energy in far more intimate ways than in the past. They will have rooftop solar, charge their electric vehicles at home and use a battery to store excess energy that will power their smart refrigerator.

Every energy retailer should be looking to the future and understanding how they can provide the right, innovative products and services to fit those needs now. Energy retailers at the forefront of energy innovation will secure customer and brand loyalty far into the future.

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