How digital products transform the customer experience in the energy sector

In a recent interview with CXM Today, Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, Customer Experience & Products at E.ON Next, highlighted that in the energy sector, customers expect and demand the same level of digital engagement they experience in other sectors – like retail or banking.

Digital products play an increasingly important role in meeting these customer expectations in the energy sector. Mobile and web apps, integrated funnels and internal platforms are all tools that can be custom-built to deliver more personalised and powerful customer experiences as well as improve operational efficiency.

In this post, we’ll look at how digital products can transform the customer experience in the energy sector. We’ll cover:

• Improving transparency to increase customer satisfaction
• Enhancing engagement to unlock upsell opportunities and provide better customer support
• Providing more personalised services
• Promoting and encouraging the adoption of sustainable energy solutions
• Making onboarding seamless
• The steps to building a successful digital product for the energy sector

Improving transparency

As of 2024, 55% of meters in UK homes and small businesses are smart meters. As connected devices become increasingly prominent in both consumer and business energy, having apps and products that can connect with these devices is beneficial in providing even more visibility and control over energy usage. With or without a smart meter, digital products are vital for providing simplified billing and account management. Providing real-time usage and billing information in one central place empowers customers and can also help to reduce complaints or concerns about billing discrepancies.

Enhancing engagement

Well-executed digital products provide another key channel for customers to interact with you. From a customer support perspective, you can incorporate things like AI-driven chat to provide quicker and more accurate support to common issues and queries, enabling you to focus more resources on more complex issues. Digital products and apps also present opportunities to upsell to customers – tariff upgrades, service plans, and physical products like new boilers, heat pumps or solar panels. These upsells will be just a few taps or clicks away from the app home screen whenever users interact with you – providing an invaluable opportunity to create a new revenue stream.

Personalised service

Powered by real-time data and AI, digital products can deliver a more personalised service to energy customers. In-app, customers can get AI-driven recommendations based on usage, driving to the upsells we mentioned in the previous section. This data can be used to offer more flexible, dynamic pricing, improving the customer experience and your competitive advantage.

Sustainability

Consumers are becoming more eco-conscious – a 2024 report found that 78% of consumers want to live more sustainable lives. Renewable energy solutions will also be attractive to business customers who may have sustainability goals in place. Digital products can be used to track customers’ carbon footprint, or the positive impact of them using renewable solutions or sources. Environmental impact can also be gamified to encourage more energy-efficient and eco-conscious behaviours, such as turning off lights, unplugging appliances and adjusting thermostats. There’s another potential upsell opportunity here too – customers could take their energy-saving efforts to the next level by improving insulation and installing renewable energy sources like solar panels.

Seamless onboarding

Often onboarding or quote funnels for energy providers are stand-alone products. This means they can be built in a custom environment separate from the main site on the backend, yet fully integrated and seamless from the frontend perspective. This can then feed seamlessly into the ongoing customer experience once they have been onboarded – there’s no need for them to provide the same information again and they’re already in your digital ecosystem.

Setting up digital products for success

Creating a successful digital product in the energy sector requires a customer-first mindset and a solid foundation for growth. By understanding customer needs and designing for the future, energy providers can deliver innovative solutions that truly transform the customer experience. Let’s unpack the key principles to guide this journey.

Understanding your customers

The starting point in building a digital product to enhance customer experience is ensuring it delivers what customers need. Before you begin, it’s vital to listen to your customers and use the data at your disposal to build the right product in the right way for them. It’s then important to have an ongoing process, creating a feedback loop to ensure future development phases improve and add features that will actually have a positive impact on the customer experience.

Focusing on scalability

Your digital product will have numerous opportunities for future growth—whether driven by internal strategic decisions or increasing customer demand. It’s vital to build your product on a solid foundation with scalability in mind – from planning for increases in requests and traffic to enabling seamless future rollouts with things like a unified codebase and UI based on a design system with reusable components.

Key takeaways

• Custom digital products help to improve transparency and enhance engagement for energy customers
• Integrating the use of AI helps to provide a more personalised service
• Apps and digital products can also assist with encouraging the use of sustainable solutions and promote eco-friendly behaviours
• Onboarding and quote funnels and stand-alone digital products enable highly optimised funnels and more opportunities for integration
• Creating a successful digital product in the energy sector relies on incorporating customer feedback and building for scalability

Are you an energy provider looking to harness digital products to create an industry-leading customer experience? Get in touch to chat about how we could help.