Big themes for utilities: After dismal pandemic years Energy and Utility sector is bouncing back to support increasing global demand (expected to well surpass pre-COVID-19 levels). They are getting at a fresh purpose in empowering their customers with greener energy and sustainable solutions. Utilities are balancing to adapt their present while also preparing for future. Several key themes are on the play to make the big impact, for example, growing complexity of energy eco system due to accelerated path to decarbonization and electrification, unprecedented frequency, intensity and unpredictability of extreme climate and weather events driving towards more resilient delivery system, transforming energy efficiency and demand response programs into real time flexible load offering, 5G technology and cloud computing to unleash the power of the growing wave of connected devices and data. In this transition path, utilities will be under tremendous pressure to balance affordability and resiliency. A societal wave is also becoming prominent where consumers expect their energy providers to treat all customers in a fair and impartial way. So how utilities address issues in the “S” category of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) will become critical. Hence advancement of social equity and environmental justice will be on top of the mind.
Are we missing the needle for critical experience transformation: In this jigsaw of big themes, we may miss the immediate and important things which relate to experience of the own employees of utilities. The world is now firmly planted in a digital-first economy. But disruptive and complex social, economic and technology currents are flowing rapidly across one another, creating choppy winds for business leaders. When conditions brought by ongoing health, social and economic disruptions continue to accelerate digital transformation, it will be important to bring structural change addressing gap between digital haves and have nots for consumers and workers. So, utilities have to search and find the real quick wins and use their imagination to make that happen. One such area normally overlooked is the non-critical business processes delivering high value in terms of operational excellence and delivering customer and employee experience. But very likely lying beyond the technology penetration and in that way manual effort intensive.
Where exactly workforce experience is getting stuck: The utility workforce is in the early stages of what we believe will be a deep, lasting transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but reflecting major shifts in the way people think about their providers of electricity, gas and water. It touches the life of all knowledge and frontline employees and bring a level playing ground for superior collaboration and productivity improvement.
Traditionally the organizations suffer from process myopia, resulting to poor experience which creates reluctant employee pool, the workplace becomes “not a daily destination”, older intranet lacking foundational capabilities like integrated workflows, lower ability to find right information due to slow and scattered content repository, less collaboration capabilities across different LOBs, knowledge silos, growing need of frontline services through mobile without proper technology enablement, legacy software in critical process and service areas, lack of governance and so on. The digital ambition and execution of the organizations is not really catering to these needs. This require a rigorous process understanding and identifying where it is broken or lying beyond technology enablement.
Workforce experience is not getting appropriate importance: We are trying to gravitate to utility field service and its workforce experience. As per IDC Worldwide Utilities 2022 top predictions, by 2025, 50% of utilities will have upgraded their field services application and deployed emerging technologies such as wearables and augmented reality, improving first-time fix rates by 50%. Modernizing the field service process does not only depend on enterprise grade field service platform implementation and new technology adaption. It certainly goes beyond where the processes are unable to embrace the technology, giving experience and engagement debt for the field workers who are really carrying the brand to the end consumers.
Field workforces are brand of organization: It is important to hire and retain the right talent and help build a path of engagement for these service champions. If everyone is using the same solution and has optimized to the nth degree, then what really differentiates the organizations are their brand, service design and ultimately the overall talent. Driving employee engagement should be one of the key growth strategies for the many businesses. Many organizations have come up with a strong statement about the role of employee engagement in improving field and customer service performance. In industries like utility, industrial manufacturing, medical devices (particularly on B2B scale) field engineers are the truly handful of employees who end up meeting and engaging with customers after the sale. A survey shows that most of all incoming requests eventually involve a field technician visit, making these agents the representatives of the organization’s brand and identity. It is also indicated that customer preference for a technician is a major factor leveraged in scheduling service agents, inferring that organizations are sometimes forced to ensure that the preferred agent makes the service visit even though another agent might be closer or more available.
Let’s explore human technology synergy: We know that delivering field service is a sequence of decisions, made by schedulers, team leaders and service engineers throughout the day. One thing that makes field service unique is that the cost of a wrong decision can be quite high. Miss the scheduled appointment and you have an angry customer and angry posts in social media. If an engineer arrives at the doorstep of a customer who is not present, you have wasted an expensive trip which you will be forced to repeat. If you arrive on time but discover that you don’t have the parts you need, the results are likely to be the same. On the other hand, if you make a good decision and thus deliver an outstanding service experience, customers will remember it. Since field service is so severely punished by bad decisions, and so rewarded by good ones, even a moderate improvement in decision quality and service experience will lead to a major improvement in the organization’s success.
Let us delve little deeper to understand different field service personas and their implicit struggle which are yet to be addressed and, in many cases, not even identified.
Figure 1: Personas related to Field Service
Figure 2: Inefficient processes and its impact in Field Service (Not exhaustive)
Faults in the business processes: The degree of complexity of business processes have been increased manifold as the utilities has expanded their services and ventured in new business areas. That drove the organizations to resort on manual and non-automated exercises. Above table shows the processes within the field service journey which are not automated or partly automated. In many cases simple field data capture, or job fulfillment or expense submission can only be done through paper-based manual processes. This negatively impact workforce experience and impact the services provided by the organizations. Normally organizations follow traditional process design and age-old legacy, or home-grown applications leaving little opportunity to modify and enhance the processes. These scenarios require fresh pair of eyes from business leaders to transform the definition of workforce experience.
Answer to the puzzle: A multitude of applications developed by different vendors and covering different needs coexist within the same organization. Utilities are no exception to this rule, especially regarding the part of their IT architecture that is non-specific to the industry. Advent and advancement of Low-code and Automation tools augment IT's ability to rapidly implement new functionality, including change in business-critical legacy systems. Processes that used to be manual and batch are now can be automated and managed in real-time, reducing errors, enabling users to manage easily, and granting more control over its operations. In a similar way, intelligent process automation simplifies and automates processes, making use of already available data. Easy-to-configure applications support users in the elaboration of vast amounts of data, providing predictive and prescriptive analytics or automating repetitive tasks and carrying them out in a fraction of the time needed by employees. IDC research shows that, by 2023, 75% of utilities will have combined IPA and low-code platforms to transform financial, legal and HR processes, accelerating applications delivery by 20 times.
Conclusion: Low-code and IPA applications are opportunities for utilities to combine their employees' creativity and expertise in making processes better, helping foster a culture of continuous development and improvement even among non-IT people. By enabling citizen development, Low Code and IPA promise to speed up and enhance Digital eXperience while reducing cost and help attract and retain talents.