Customer and Billing Transformation

In Power and utilities

Yesterday’s tools cannot deliver what today’s customers demand. EY’s Customer and Billing Transformation solution helps power and utilities companies achieve a competitive advantage by adopting the capabilities and culture needed to support the transition to more customer-centric business models.

Related topics Power and utilities Energy and resources FutureConsumer.Now

The team

David Townshend

David Townshend

EY Global Energy SAP Leader

What EY can do for you

Utilities must respond to the customer-driven transformation of their sector – or risk being left in the dark.

Traditional utility business models are under attack from multiple forces, including the rise of distributed generation, higher customer expectations, and pressure from new competitors and regulators. Utilities know they must improve efficiency, cut costs and become digitally enabled, customer-focused organizations – but understanding how to change and where it matters most will determine success.

EY’s Customer and Billing Transformation (CBT) solution helps utilities develop customer-first operating models and the tools, capabilities and culture to underpin them. Our teams work with yours to remove customer pain points, use digital channels to design better customer journeys, and create the products and services that engage customers and win their long-term loyalty.

Unlike traditional, multi-year change programs, EY’s CBT solution delivers tangible results fast while supporting longer-term goals. Our proven method includes:

  • Leading a step-by-step approach to transformation across the business
  • Focusing on the activities that add the most value to the business
  • Supporting the transition from on-premise legacy systems to cloud-based, customer-centric architectures
  • Defining the capabilities that will shape a new culture of innovation
  • Applying leading-practice customer experience drawn from other sectors 
  • Using analytics to drive operational excellence
  • Ensuring local market conditions inform transformation
  • Considering wider implications of change, including risks, controls and tax

Winning the customer is critical to securing a competitive advantage. EY’s Customer and Billing Transformation solution helps utilities build powerful customer-driven operating models to gain this edge, while reducing the cost to serve, exploring new revenue streams, and embedding the flexibility to evolve and reshape in the future.

EY Customer and Billing Transformation in action: Case studies

  • Large US energy company designs new customer experiences rapidly

    This new energy world puts traditional utility business models under pressure. Creating new opportunities to realize value for the business and for today’s prosumers requires utilities to focus on offering superior experiences.

    When one large multi-state US energy company decided to make this shift, EY developed a program to give a broader understanding of customer needs and expectations, and help the company drive digital and business transformation.

    Taking a holistic approach, we brought together a team from across EY with experience that spanned business, experience design and technology resources. We worked at speed to develop and iterate a portfolio of new customer experiences, including issue resolution, and improving and digitizing the home services journey, while at the same time, helping them develop the capabilities and agility needed to reshape and manage ongoing change continually.

    This ability to design, test and iterate new customer experiences rapidly has allowed the energy company to quickly launch and scale products and services that customers want.

  • Major European energy retailer defines its future-state IT architecture

    A decentralized, digitized energy world has significant ramifications for energy retailers: not least that legacy onsite IT systems lack the agility and flexibility to integrate with new energy solutions and are costly to maintain. Energy retailers must therefore quickly transition to new technology architecture that enables transformation.

    When one major European energy retailer faced challenges in defining its future-state IT architecture, it turned to EY to help find a solution.

    We started by working with business and IT stakeholders to agree the future vision for the organization. We then defined the principles that would guide the new architecture: for example, improving customer centricity, and having flexible and agile processes. Using these principles, EY helped the energy retailer take a business-first approach and, together, we built a target-state architecture, business and IT road map.

    The outcome was both a deeper understanding of the people, process and cultural change required to become a truly customer-centric organization, and an IT architecture that enabled this transformation. The energy retailer now has the flexibility to rapidly add new products and services, and to build in differentiation at the customer and experience layers.

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