IDC Energy Insights: Worldwide Utilities Customer Experience Strategies

Utilities and energy retailers face numerous serious challenges, foremost among them, meeting customer expectations set beyond their own industry and facing off with new market entrants. Aside from the need to lower the cost to serve, companies are now focused on improving customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores in competitive markets, lowering customer effort scores, enhancing customer lifetime value, and lowering customer acquisition costs. This requires significant investments in reshaping their business processes to be truly customer centric in both competitive and regulated markets. The IDC Energy Insights: Worldwide Utilities Customer Experience Strategies service is designed to help utilities and energy retailers servicing customers in competitive and regulated markets at the worldwide level (including electricity, gas, and water). The service provides exclusive research and direct access to experts providing guidance to make the right IT investments to achieve end-to-end omni-channel customer journeys, 360-degree customer views, and enhanced CX analytics for the B2B and B2C markets.

This service develops unique analysis and comprehensive data through IDC Energy Insights' proprietary research projects, along with ongoing communications with industry experts, utility management, ICT vendors, and service providers. With decades of experience in the utility industry, our analysts leverage a broad spectrum of expertise and intellectual property from both IDC and IDC Energy Insights. Research reports elucidate business strategy, best practices, technology selection, and vendor assessment, along with short perspectives on topical issues. To ensure relevance, our analysts work with subscribers to identify and prioritize specific topics to be covered in research reports.

Throughout the year, this service will address the following topics:

• Business model innovation — processes and operations innovation, and technology-enabled innovation
• Customer experience transformation
• Customer-facing technologies, including self-generation systems, electric vehicles, smart home devices, and other energy-efficient tools
• Evolution in major applications adopted by utilities and energy retailers, including CIS&B, digital customer engagement, customer relationship management/customer experience management, meter data management, and HEM
• Best practices and case studies related to business process and technology alignment
• IDC MarketScape evaluating technologies and providers that service global utility customer operations
• Critical business and regulatory drivers impacting customer operations
• Emerging technologies (e.g., embedded intelligence and automation technologies, big data and advanced analytics, the metaverse, and generative AI) and their impact on customer operations and strategies

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. How are utilities transforming their customer operations to be resilient to disruptions? What is being disrupted? Will utilities be able to reap benefits in the short term?
2. What are the key market trends and challenges facing utilities' customer operations and strategies in the years ahead?
3. What are the opportunities and threats with business models changing, and what are the technology requirements?
4. What is the impact of information technology investments on the performance of customer operations?
5. How are peers in energy and water supply leveraging technology to generate revenue, increase efficiencies, reduce costs, gain competitive advantage, and ensure regulatory compliance?
6. How do emerging technologies such as IoT, cognitive systems, big data and analytics, cloud, mobility, and social business apply to utility customer operations?
7. How are utilities improving customer engagement and trust?

The IDC Energy Insights: Worldwide Utilities Customer Experience Strategies service is ideally suited to support the needs of business managers responsible for customer strategies and operations and IT executives who support this function. Technology suppliers specialized in offering customer care, billing, and smart metering services and solutions to utilities will also benefit from this service with a better understanding of key market trends and challenges.