Research

Energy Suppliers Need to Take a Mobile-First Approach to Customer Experience and Engagement

In these exceptional circumstances, we understand the pressure you are under to meet the needs of all your customers. Now, it is more important than ever to fast forward plans for delivering high quality and seamless digital experiences across mobile, web, and voice to ensure priority customer interactions can be addressed, and the impact on contact centre operations is minimised. Our study compares and contrasts the mobile offerings of the UK’s energy suppliers and explores whether they are delivering the experiences customers increasingly expect.

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.