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How can you build trust with your customers?

April 3, 2019

summit

We sat down with Mala Morris (Head of Marketing and  Partnerships, vyn) and Sabya Kar (Head of European Sales, vyn), to get the inside story on the Future of Utilities Summit 2019 in London last week. Spread over two days, attendees heard new ideas to future-proof their business on topics including:

summit vyn
  • Powering Innovation to nurture the future of Utilities
  • Customer Service Transformation
  • Digitalisation of Asset Management

What are the 3 (or 4) most significant industry trends that you identified from this year’s Future of Utilities Summit?

Engaging better with customers and listening to the voice of the customer emerged as a key theme during the summit.  According to Steve Roberston – CEO of Thames Water – “The biggest barrier to long term investment is gaining the trust of customers”.

{tweetme}”The biggest barrier to long term investment is gaining the trust of customers”{/tweetme}

There is significant investment in Digital and AI to improve how utility companies communicate with customers. However, as with any industry, there is recognition of the need to complement digital with human interaction and drive a balance.

There is a need to provide more channels for customers to interact with utility companies. Cross-utility digital platforms will emerge to provide a seamless way for users to report their problems, irrespective of whether it’s about water, gas or electricity. Those platforms could also be a great way for utility companies to communicate back with their customers on issues that could impact them – from weather change to local activities.

Q. How do you see the utilities industry evolving over the next 5 years?

The utilities industry will transform from an asset intensive industry to a data intensive industry. There are multiple sources of data from smart devices, smart meters, sensors to actual manual data collected from the field. This will drive significant predictive algorithms to reduce both cost and energy efficiency. It will also drive the rollout of new services and green energy products. It will be important to enable digital AI-ready data collection from all sources – be it field teams or machines.

{tweetme}“People miss a key point of AI. It all starts with human interaction”
– Kapil Singhal, CEO, vyn{/tweetme}

Q. How does vyn address some of the key challenges faced by the utilities industry?

vyn can assist organisations in the Utilities industry by:

1: Building trust with customers – through the provision of a simple and transparent visual platform for customers to make more informed decisions

2: Helping to create a culture of safety and trust with proactive and timely sharing of visual data, that can be tagged, processed and actioned

3: Providing a new channel for asset management – surveys, condition reports, repairs and maintenance – driving reduced costs and also better predictive maintenance

mala summit

All in all, we gained some valuable insights and perspectives from leaders, innovators and regulators at the Future of Utilities Summit.
We learnt that…

  • Leadership is willing to change for the better and drive innovation
  • Disruption is critical for success and creates the urgency for change
  • Gaining the trust of customers through transparency with improved communication is vital to meeting customer expectations

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to know more about our work with Utilities organisations, check out our latest case study. Or to get more insights like this straight into your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

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