About the Client
As one of the nation’s greenest utilities, our client is a leader in energy efficiency and a force in thinking progressively about addressing tough questions facing the energy industry. They are an electric-only municipal utility that serves a rapidly growing city.
The Situation
In 2019, our client approached us to help them develop a strategy and roadmap to transform their customer’s experiences with them—including all facets of utility customer services from setting up new accounts and paying bills, to delivering electric services and discovering energy efficiency opportunities. Our client saw a wave of changes in the energy industry approaching and wanted to be proactive and strategic around managing those changes to create positive and engaging customer experiences and relationships. Expected changes included moving from strictly selling electricity to helping customers manage a variety of energy sources, moving from responsive customer relationships to proactive relationships, and providing more personalized and real-time services.
Our Approach
EMI Consulting provided a multi-step approach to developing a comprehensive CX strategy and roadmap, with the goal of engaging key staff throughout the utility while also working closely with the executive team to ensure the experience aligned with our client’s corporate vision and ensure executive-level sponsorship of the final product. Following a kick-off meeting, our team conducted a series of interviews and a workshop with the utility’s leaders and key staff to better understand current and desired customer experiences. We then held a workshop with the executive team to review these preliminary findings and set the direction and parameters for ideation workshops. The ideation workshops focused on needed external changes required to transform customer experiences and internal changes required to realize customer experience transformation. We then laid out a roadmap to pursue changes and followed-up with the executive team to team to sign-off on their sponsorship of the strategy, roadmap, and next steps.
The Result
This project provided our client with a comprehensive strategy that it will use to prioritize and align company-wide initiatives now and in the future. We created—and gained leadership sponsorship—to immediately develop an internal task force to pursue short-term action items that will serve as the foundation for our client’s customer transformation needs. This groundwork will not only develop greater customer relationships, but it will also serve to enable our client to act on major changes in the energy industry, including electric vehicles, renewables, demand management, and real-time proactive customer service.
