Update September 1, 2024
As the energy transition is accelerating, consumers set clear expectations about what they want from their energy providers. According to the Ernst & Young “Navigating the Energy Transition Consumer Survey”, a significant 57% of consumers prioritise choice, convenience, and control when surveying the products and services of electricity suppliers. Additionally, 64% seek sustainable products that align with their values of green energy and social responsibility. Lastly, 74% consider affordable energy rates and programs crucial factors.
Energy providers can capitalise on the current momentum by actively involving consumers in the energy transition. This can be achieved by supporting behavioural shifts and promoting efficient energy usage. By offering tailored energy solutions that align with consumer needs, companies can create significant value throughout the process.
During this period, energy companies will also require technological enablers to assist them in designing innovative offerings within the ongoing energy transition. By introducing a wider range of new energy products and services, energy providers can establish a business that is centred around people and supported by technology.
We’ve already explored how energy and utility organisations can leverage technology to design pricing structures and incorporate necessary programs. Now, let’s dive into the types of energy solutions that consumers demand nowadays and how businesses can expand their offerings by diversifying their portfolios.
From Concept to Reality: Developing and Incubating New Products and Services
According to E&Y research, consumers show a substantial interest in embracing new energy products and services, particularly when the offerings align with three key areas: cost savings, time efficiency, and environmental sustainability.
Energy providers need to prioritize the development and incubation of new products and services, whether through internal efforts or by collaborating with a network of partners. Acting promptly in this regard can lead to significant benefits, as the survey reveals that 50% of consumers would prefer to purchase new energy solutions directly from their energy providers. Furthermore, consumers demonstrate a keen interest in a diverse range of offerings, such as Pay-in-advance energy options, self-generation systems, and electric vehicles (EVs).
A notable 36% of the 34,000 energy consumers surveyed expressed a willingness to pay a premium for sustainable products and services. Surprisingly, only 54% of respondents indicated satisfaction with the existing sustainable offerings provided by their energy provider.
To successfully develop and implement new products and services, a comprehensive approach is required. This approach should be supported by technological enablers that facilitate the creation and efficient management of these offerings, ensuring convenience for both providers and consumers.
MaxBill Product Catalog: Empowering E&U Companies to Transform Their Solutions with a Focus on Customers
The MaxBill product catalog represents a dynamic application or web interface, serving as the cornerstone of offering design in limitless combinations for consumers. It goes beyond customer plans, incorporating comprehensive management schemes to enhance convenience and usability for customer service representatives within energy and utility organisations.
The product catalog serves as a unified platform for consolidating the company’s technical and marketing expertise across all its business lines, ensuring a comprehensive knowledge base for customer offerings. This versatile system enables the creation of offerings that seamlessly integrate products from various vertical markets, facilitating full convergence and enabling the development of a diverse portfolio of products that align with market demands.
By leveraging the capabilities of the product catalog, businesses can effectively adapt to evolving market requirements and strategically build a robust product portfolio that drives growth and customer satisfaction.
The product catalog empowers businesses with a wide array of capabilities and processes that drive operational efficiency and enhance customer experiences:
- Streamlined product hierarchy and packages: Easily manage complex product structures and bundles to meet diverse customer needs.
- Seamless integration of cross-product services: Effortlessly combine gas, water, and electricity services into comprehensive offerings for enhanced convenience and value.
- Rule-based fulfilment for efficient operations: Utilize intelligent rules to group packages based on regions, categories, and business criteria, ensuring optimal assignment and fulfilment processes.
- Multi-company and multi-instance support: Seamlessly integrate third-party products and services into a unified package on a single platform, simplifying operations and expanding business opportunities.
- Effective product lifecycle management: Efficiently create new products and design compelling offerings, while effectively managing the entire lifecycle from conception to retirement.
- Centralized knowledge hub: Access a comprehensive repository of marketing and technical information about all products and packages, enabling quick and informed decision-making.
- Simplified operations with a unified interface: Experience operational simplicity through a user-friendly application or web interface that provides a consolidated view of all products and services.
- Streamlined bulk data management: Perform bulk export/import and automate massive updates of tariffs based on complex criteria, saving time and effort.
- Flexible product configuration: Easily customize and configure various parameters for products to meet specific business requirements.
- Enhanced versioning and historical tracking: Seamlessly manage product changes, versioning, and future dates with automated processes and detailed configuration, ensuring accuracy and compliance.
The product catalog seamlessly integrates product information with pricing strategies, ensuring efficient synchronization across all operation support systems (OSS) and billing support systems (BSS). It forms a close interconnection with the utility business’ essential systems, including CRM, order management, financing, billing, and provisioning:
- CRM: Leveraging the product catalog, relevant product information is seamlessly integrated into customer-based processes, ensuring a tailored fit between customers and their products. Centralised configuration and validation capabilities within the product catalog streamline order management processes.
- Order Management: The product catalog facilitates smooth communication between systems by mapping product codes across different systems. This synchronization ensures accurate revenue adjustments, cost computations, and revenue centre management.
- Provisioning: Parameters related to various product lines are efficiently configured within the product catalog, providing centralized and unified control over the capabilities of diverse network elements. This streamlines the provisioning process and enables comprehensive management of network resources.
- Billing: The product catalog serves as a centralised repository for price catalogs and billing parameters. By managing this critical information within the product catalog, the need for separate definitions and maintenance of product information in different billing systems is eliminated, streamlining billing processes and enhancing data accuracy.
Such a solution empowers service providers with the ability to offer multiple-play products and packages encompassing a range of utility-based services. With its comprehensive capabilities, the product catalogue enables seamless collaboration across multiple departments within the organization, allowing easy control over various aspects of product offerings, configurations, pricing, and discount schemes.
Need a technology partner for building new products and services? Contact us to start the conversation.
Expanding your portfolio with EV charging service.
At MaxBill, we see many European utilities add EV charging services to their portfolio. Recently, we’ve discussed 8 possible scenarios of EV charging service delivery and billing for a major European utility in Eastern Europe.
To be as helpful for our current and potential as possible, we’re launching a webinar on “Crashing your portfolio with new services like EV charging” on October 19. We’ll decode the ins and outs of how to add EV charging service to your existing portfolio, covering all the details, addressing objections, and explaining how we can deal with local peculiarities!
Follow us as we’re about to open the registration any time soon!
