Modernizing the customer onboarding process for Utilities

Digital transformation in utilities is essential to keeping up with evolving consumer needs, demands, and behaviors. Modernizing your digital onboarding experience will not only increase customer satisfaction but concurrently improve retention and reduce costs.

This poses several questions: How can you reduce friction, digitize communications, and ignite a superior user experience? What steps need to be taken to automate this critical process and how can you ensure your capturing valid, accurate data that can fuel decisioning and improve results? 

Over the past five years, I’ve worked with a wide range of regional, national, and global utilities on their modernization and digitization projects. Experian has helped streamline processes and reduce friction during onboarding, enabling utilities to engage with customers in the places and platforms they prefer.

The current COVID pandemic is forcing many organizations to implement similar strategies to keep up and stay relevant. I thought it would be helpful to share best practices for streamlined digital onboarding of new customers.

This may seem obvious, but the foundation for success is planning.

Start by knowing what resources and budget can be allocated to these improvements. Then, identify the goals for the project and how will success be measured. You can start by asking questions like: Are you looking to implement incremental improvements or a rapid and complete overhaul? What are you hoping to achieve and why its important to the business? Some examples I’ve seen firsthand are:

• Improve data accuracy and completeness of client profiles.
• Increase self-service success rate.
• Create operational efficiencies.
• Reduce friction.
• Improve customer experience.

The most successful onboarding modernization projects I’ve worked on have included a few key components:

• Data matching capabilities to search and match to existing records to ensure the correct serviceable footprint and that no duplicate accounts are created.
• Data verification at point of capture for critical contact data elements like billing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.
• Append data offering to fill in gaps to complete client profiles.
• Data enrichment to gain valuable insight into your clients ensuring the best experience and ongoing relationship.

The combination of these frictionless solutions delivers the modern client onboarding experience that users have grown to know and frankly expect from their suppliers today. 

Are you looking to modernize your customer onboarding experience?

Speak with an expert today