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Utility companies must acquire the ability to continually learn about their client, in order to be able to offer personalized quality services, says Mihai Macarie, responsible for the Energy Efficiency in Future Energy Leaders of Romania (VLER), a program of Romanian National Committee of the World Energy Council (RNC-WEC). At this time, utilities perform in Romania only basic activities, profitable for this sector, because it is a natural monopoly, the energy market is not really liberalized and the consumers do not have the necessary motivation or information to change the provider. Changing the business philosophy, the courage to build unprecedented loyalty and optimizing instruments will be incorporated into the mission and assumed by these companies, believes Mihai Macarie.
What future do the acquisition and analysis platforms of energy consumption have?
The short answer would be: the future is theirs. The long answer starts from the most general statement that we “cannot optimize what we cannot measure.” From the point of view of an entity that is directly related to its client, a natural need for such services is created, if an essential requirement is met: the market must actually be free, the client has to exercise the right to no longer be trapped, and he is the one that chooses the electricity provider.
Although now for a part of the market there is this possibility, the domestic client needs to know about this possibility and how it can be used. Commercial and industrial customers know it, but in their case the price is a benefit (and often it does not exist) and a benefit regarding the quality of the purchased energy; quality does not improve by changing the provider, but by improving physical distribution network and the provider does not want to participate in this process. When these two benefits do not exist, which represents our case, the industrial consumer does not change the provider.
Only in a truly competitive market utility companies will start to provide value-added services. Utilities must come to advise the client, not just to bill him. Until then, in the regulated market of household consumption in Romania, the utility companies do well several basic universal activities: issuing the location approval, they conduct the electricity grid connections and track the client consumption. In business, as in international relations, the goal is survival, and companies will have to learn new, essential things, for achieving this goal. One of them is that the subscriber becomes the center of business in this sector after the change of paradigm.
Moreover, based on data taken over from the customer, the utility can occur through various mechanisms for which suppliers already exist.
How should the utility companies refer to such solutions?
Utility companies will have to ask themselves some questions, to which then they should find answers: How do we attract new customers? How do we make our customers loyal? How can we determine customers to pay bills quicker? What can we do so we can demand more from our customers? The supply of electricity is competitive; the margins of each actor are decreasing with each new entity entering into this sector. Survival is not a blind battle anymore, but it becomes a science. Here is the next step; the entity becomes a utility company 2.0. This mutation represents the initiation of a data personalized communication, between the company and the client, allowing the construction of a well-targeted message. At some point, it will need tools to send personalized messages to a large number of consumers.