Utility company improves omnichannel brand experience | New Era Technology

Traditionally, utility companies only interact with their active customers during negative triggers, such as outages or billing issues. However, Vectren, a natural gas utility company, wanted to provide the high-level engagement today's customers expect and create positive experiences to build lasting relationships.

To meet this goal, they needed more insight into their customers' online behavior to build a holistic, predictive, and adaptable digital strategy. They needed their strategy to include integrating channel use, building a solid, flexible technology foundation, and creating a path to providing a more personalized customer experience. To elevate their omnichannel brand experience, they connected with New Era Technology to build a digital roadmap of solutions to meeting their goals. 

New Era Technology worked closely with Vectren to evaluate the comprehensive customer journey. This included analyzing customer behaviors and experiences across online and offline channels and weighing these against how Vectren's data, technology, human resources, and organizational structure was capable of supporting omnichannel delivery.  

Our team started by mapping the customer journey. During this exercise, the Vectren team matched customer touchpoints to tasks and identified areas of operational and technical processes that triggered higher incidents of customer dissatisfaction.  

Completing this exercise helped Vectren identify:

• Siloed systems and data
• Bottlenecks in both processes and resources  
• Interaction points that blocked customer engagement rather than nurtured it.

After identifying areas of friction within the customer journey, the next step was analyzing these customer touchpoints. We conducted an in-depth analysis of their content and audited key customer touchpoints and their underlying processes and technologies, including their: 

• Corporate website
• Online transaction and communication portals
• Mobile app functions
• Microsites
• Social channels
• Email 
• Customer and organizational data
• Customer service channels

In addition to analyzing the omnichannel brand experience, we looked at external data, including industry trends, competitor research, and best practices recommendations. Once we completed both the internal and external analysis, we helped Vectren leaders identify: 

• How to fully integrate customer awareness channels into the digital journey
• Specific digital touchpoints and business processes that needed to be re-engineered to minimize friction and increase customer satisfaction
• Opportunities to improve brand value and engage in more effective and positive individual conversations with customers
• Key initiatives to prioritize based on customer preferences and behaviors (by programs, social channel, device, etc.)
• Opportunities for cross-departmental and cross-disciplinary collaboration

After sharing this analysis, New Era Technology provided Vectren leaders with a digital roadmap that identified projects, showed skill gaps, and prioritized remediation. We also provided a communication tool to help educate Vectren teams about the overarching value of this approach to improving their brand experience. Our team also highlighted resource needs, technology impacts, and how to measure progress and success as they implemented their roadmap.