It’s no understatement that energy customers are currently going through unprecedented and challenging times due to significant rises in market prices.
Energy retailers are doing their best to help customers by reviewing internal and external processes to optimise and reduce costs; moving to a digital solution that manages the entire customer lifecycle could provide retailers with a significant cost saving on their legacy estate, which in turn could be passed onto customers as savings.
In this blog, I will outline how upgrading solutions will maximise operational efficiency and reduce costs for energy retailers, highlighting some of the challenges and benefits we have seen in this sector.
Why aren’t current solutions up to scratch?
Having worked with multiple energy retailers over the past two decades, we have seen legacy solutions using multiple CRM platforms/applications to manage customers E2E, with different products and customer profiles spread across various systems.
There are many disadvantages to this approach – it makes operational processing more difficult, customer handling times longer and increases cost to serve. Additionally, legacy architecture limits integration with newer technologies (e.g., APIs), resulting in costly workarounds to achieve desired outcomes.
Why should energy retailers be upgrading?
Ultimately, it’s about improving the customer experience and decreasing costs - an integrated digital solution is much easier for employees, partners and consumers to use, and creates growth for new products and services to help remain competitive.
We’re already seeing this happen across the market; a great example is an organisation we’re working with who launched a new tariff within four weeks on a new integrated digital solution (compared to an average of one year on their previous one) – much quicker and cheaper!
These are the key improvements you can expect when transitioning to a digital solution compared to legacy:
- Speed of change - agile delivery opposed to waterfall in main
- Removal of batch processing - utilising APIs providing 24-hour processing ability
- Better integration with customer self-service channels - such as apps and messaging
- No need for major release cycles - no longer having to take down production system to release major changes, as changes managed through agile change processes
- Reduced risk of defects and issues caused by data misalignment
- Introduction of microservices and real time views
- Ease of integration - dedicated solution with multiple interface options to manage transformation from legacy to target system
Don’t forget debt management and credit risk
There’s no doubt that energy retailers are seeing improvements from these E2E solutions. But one word of caution from us – make sure that the debt part of the lifecycle is not ignored during the transition (we’ve seen it happen).
As these systems cover the whole of the customer lifecycle, there are parts of the debt management journey where more comprehensive and specialist functionality should be introduced, such as, dynamic and smart paths and strategy decision engine with integrated third-party agent management.
The key to is to integrate an appropriate debt and collection management solution that supports short and long-term business vision and strategy.
Not sure where to start?
Arum has extensive knowledge of the collections and recoveries technology landscape and wider digital expertise, and we’re already helping many organisations with the challenges created by legacy solutions. As well as supporting you with your legacy system, we can also help you quickly and seamlessly transition to a new one.
If you would like to discuss any of the topics raised here, please feel free to contact me.
About the author
Nazaqat Ali
Senior Consultant
Arum