This post was originally published on EnergySavvy’s website. EnergySavvy is now Uplight.

One of the things we’ve found in working with so many utilities across the country on their customer experience transformation efforts is just how daunting it can seem to deliver customers a meaningfully personalized experience. In fact, at the surface it can appear to be the opposite of what an energy utility was founded to accomplish: delivering everyone a reliably safe and consistent level of gas or electric service, and nothing more!

Yet even as utilities are dealing with the effects of evolving regulatory requirements and a need to hit new and challenging business objectives, today’s customers now have the expectation that their utility should be able to provide the same level of personalized customer experience that they receive from the many other e-commerce and consumer services they use each day. What’s more, customers also now have more energy options and alternatives outside their utility than ever before. But for many utilities now trying to respond these challenges in the face of outdated IT infrastructure, siloed customer data, the need for opex reductions, and/or ongoing c-sat issues, it’s hard to know where to begin.

In a great new article just published on Energy Central, utility industry veteran and EnergySavvy’s product marketing leader, Travis Rhodes, identifies some of the critical areas of focus utilities should consider when investing in customer personalization efforts. In the piece, Travis lays out a few of the proven techniques from other leading industries that utilities can learn from to get started more quickly when leveraging personalization to deliver on customer and business priorities. These are the strategies utilities will need to use if they hope to get full ROI from this important new area of investment—and do so without breaking the budget. We think you’ll enjoy the article, so do check it out!