Why Energy Suppliers Need to Take Mobile-First Approach to Customer Experience

Utility providers are under intense pressure to meet their customers’ needs. The current crisis presents a great opportunity to accelerate plans for designing and delivering seamless customer experience across mobile, web, and voice to ensure priority customer interactions can be addressed, and the effect on contact centre operations is minimised.

This study compares and contrasts the mobile offerings of the UK’s energy suppliers and explores whether they are delivering the experiences customers increasingly expect, and understand the future of customer experience.

Key findings:

• Low differentiation across the energy sector: Large energy suppliers lead the way in designing and delivering mobile experiences, and, surprisingly, challengers don’t stand out and currently have apps narrow in scope focused on simplicity and ease of use.
• Web remains the primary investment channel: Energy Suppliers continue to over invest in their websites and call centres.  As such, mobile apps’ customer engagement and usage is low, as the current experiences offered do not meet basic expectations.
• Most apps show little innovation in emerging energy propositions and their future growth: Across the board, we found little evidence of app support for dynamic pricing, electric vehicles, smart home controls, and distributed energy generation – these digital first propositions are a perfect fit for mobile apps, and their absence suggests that apps aren’t evolving to meet future customer needs.