6.1 Introduction

The sole purpose of the electricity industry is to serve those who use electricity—our customers.

What is a Customer?

To reflect our sole purpose, we refer specifically to “customers.” Electricity customers are individuals or organizations that pay the bill, while electricity consumers include anyone that uses electricity. At times, these terms are used interchangeably. For an electricity service provider, the term “customer” reflects a modern customer-centric perspective, versus the former term of “rate payer,” which reflected a now outdated utility-centric perspective. Within utilities, customers are generally classified in categories such as residential, commercial, industrial, and large users, among others.

Reference Documents

To facilitate your understanding of terminology used in this course, please download the glossary of electrical terms.

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Customer Interaction

A customer calls up their local electricity utility to ask a question about their billing. When this routine interaction has concluded, the customer proceeds to ask some questions about the environmental impact of the utility: Does the utility use coal generation, solar and wind power, or nuclear generation? What is the utility doing to curb their carbon emissions?

How should the customer service representative respond?

Tell the customer the truth—that their utility is making every effort to be environmentally responsible in the provision of electricity, and this includes the use of a responsible mix of generation. The mix includes renewable sources such as solar and wind, but the electricity supply may also include other sources such as nuclear and hydroelectric generation along with coal and gas in order to provide a baseline of service.

The Customer Experience

Today, utilities are transitioning from the concept of providing good customer service to providing a good customer experience. But what is the difference?

Customer service is typically focused on the transactional level of providing a service—for example, how pleasant a call centre representative was to deal with.

Customer experience, however, is focused on the image of the utility and the experience the customer has with its operations, including environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility, community presence, operational and service quality, and other considerations.

When dealing with customers, modern utilities are focused on being easy to do business with, caring, efficient, and knowledgeable. In their day-to-day interactions with customers, they are providing tools and technologies to help deliver customer choice, convenience, control, and communication. This is, of course, in addition to the fundamental requirements of providing safe and reliable electricity and timely and accurate billing.

Traits and Commitments

When thinking about providing a quality customer experience, keep in mind the traits of a quality customer experience, as well as the commitments expected of an enterprise concerned with delivering it.

Traits

• Easy to do business with

• Caring

• Efficient

• Knowledgeable

Commitments • Choice

• Convenience

• Control

• Communication

Now that you understand what we mean by “customer experience,” let’s take a closer look at the tools utilities use to ensure they are delivering a quality customer experience.