Lessons from Business Customers to Enliven Your Residential Customer Experience.

Questline Digital's webinars always deliver fresh insights and the October Webinar "Proven Ways Utilities are Improving Business Customer Satisfaction" certainly extended their streak. With a powerhouse panel including Derek Rahn from Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities (LG&E and KU), Ammanuel Moore with Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), and Sarah Sharp, now at Questline but recently from Entergy, the discusion provied a ton of interesting insights, best practices, and terrific conversation.

We appreciated the differences and similarities utilities face with their business and residential customers. Business customers clearly face very different challenges, especially at scale, compared to residential energy consumers, but the strategies that these utilities employed to deliver success teach us lessons that apply to residential programs, too.

Just a few highlights:

Derek Rahn shared that LG&E and KU build programs for that strive to go beyond to enhance very interaction with their business customers and community members and to build on customer experiences as a journey and not a destination.

We agree, and suggest that utilities employ customer journey frameworks for all customres. Delivering "above and beyond" in a critical first experience that a new utility customers has during service set up, for example, creates a perfect start to a long term customer journey with high CSAT and lifetime value. The approach works for business customers AND residential customers, just with a different focus on what extra help utilities can offer.

New business customers may face challenges with infrastructure, financing, energy management, and regulatory requriement depending on their industry, regarding how they will use and manage energy at scale. Utilities have long understood these challenges and built "onboarding" programs to support their C&I customers.

That same "onboarding" path also works for residential energy customers, as they usually call the utility ahead of their move to a new residence. Utilities can ease the stress and strain of a moving experience for a new residential customer by adding support for mover services, introducing customers to their Beyond the Meter programs, enrolling customers in a newsletter program, and offering support for EVs and energy efficiency programs at the time of the service enrollment. Showing customers a world class experience at the start of their utility customer journey sets up the utility AND the customer for a rewarding relationship across the entire lifecycle.

Ammanuel Moore at BGE provided insights about how their teams look beyond solving problems " in the moment" that might cause a call to the business center, and focus on how to get ahead of these problems in the long run. Moore said "If we really want to influence customer satisfaction, it can't just be through taking reliability and billing calls and solving problems. We have to engage our customers proactively. We have to be top of mind."

We agree with Ammanuel, the Director of Large Customer Services at BGE. Getting proactive, which means anticipating the needs of customers and recommending options before our customers experience challenges, demonstrates to customers that the utility really understands their needs and has solutions.

That approach also works with residential customers, perhaps with an easier path to proactive engagement. Leveraging customer personas and segmentation, for example, helps the utility anticipate customers who might benefit from a payment assistance program BEFORE experiencing a late bill. Putting together energy use and billing data with a qualified data analyst results in a predictive model for delinquencies that gives the utility the opportunity to help customers ahead of high bill and late payment "seasons" and improve program adoption AND customer satisfaction with the utility.

Sarah Sharp spoke to the importance of connecting with business customers where they are and with messages they care about as a way to improve customer satisfaction. Business customers have a lot of demands on their time, so providing customers with information and insights keyed to their industry or energy use, for example, gives them a quicker path to digesting relevant, timely and helpful information instead of wading through a generic newsletter or waiting for a problem to occur and needing to research solutions from scratch. Delivering those personalized insights in the customers "channel of choice" reduces friction in the communication chain.

We'd suggest that residential customers also appreciate relevant, timely and personalized communication delivered to their inbox or phone in the channel they most use and depend on for insights. It might be a social post about EVs designed for look alike audiences of known EV drivers in a market, or a high bill reminder in the mobile app, or a personalized video about the value of energy management programs and the benefits for their household budget. The key involves using available data to make sure the communication fits the customer needs. A few tips to optimize for personalization:

• Offer customers a few different newsletters to enable them to self-select for their interests. Each newsletter maps to a different customer segment or interest to improve the relevance of your future communication.

• Opt-in for ongoing communication and ask customers for digital preferences like email address, SMS, or app notifications. Collect those preferences from the start to ensure meeting customers in their "channel of choice." Many companies encourage customers to manage their preferences, but that invitation usually maps to the bottom of an email and only gets noticed when customers are looking for an "unsubscribe" option. Collecting digital preferences at the first customer experience improves the chance your communications won't ever be unsubscribed.

• Social Media tools enable look-alike audiences and abundant demographic information to help companies connect with people of similar interests and intent. Leverage these tools to find customers who may not be aware of utility programs, and register those interests for future communication.

Utility business customers have unique needs, and responsive utilities deliver great value to those customers by understanding the SMB and C&I customer ecosystem. Anticipating challenges, offering solutions, and delivering relevant insights and value continuously to business customers in their channel of choice helps utilities improve the customer experience, deliver great CSAT, and optimize for superior customer lifetime value.

That same approach also fits a utility's residential customer base. Those residential customers may face difference challenges compared to a typical business customer, but the approach to understanding their interests and needs, getting ahead of that curve to offer solutions proactively, and keeping a line of communication open with customers where and how they want to engage makes a big difference in building a highly satisfying customer experience versus just responding to rate payers.