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How technology can help us to be more human…..

Earlier this week our Chief Commercial Officer Penelope took part in a webinar hosted by MarketForce, which brought together a series of experts from across the utilities sector to discuss the critical topic of customer experience and how digital transformation can be used to better interact with customers.

Getting this right from the start is something that is taking up a large amount of our time right now.  A typical energy customer will think about their supplier for only around 7 minutes a year (yes, a year!), and usually that’s only because something has gone wrong.  Here at Rebel we want to give our customers a compelling reason to engage with us – whether that be to find out more about our ‘renew’ approach to the environment, or to discover more about our strategy to alleviating fuel poverty.

One of the key themes that came out of the session looked at how customer expectations have changed over recent years, and this has only been accelerated by the upheaval of the last few months.  People are using more energy as they spend time at home, and are keen to understand what they can do to be more efficient and spend less on their bills. But the biggest change we’ve seen is how people are looking to brands to provide positive leadership – both in how ethically they do business, but also in their approach to sustainability.  Customers are also demanding a more personal connection with the business they use and ironically enough, it is technology that will enable better personalisation of the products and services that we offer

Right now, as we design and build our business ready for launch, we are focussing on making sure that we are using AI and cutting edge automated processes to free up our customer services people to be able to have genuine and useful conversations with our customers – using technology to allow people to have better human interactions with their energy supplier.  And because we’re not constrained by legacy technology, like the traditional energy companies, we can build faster and better.  It is that technology, and the data that it manages, that will allow us to help customers get out of fuel poverty, by being able to make more accurate decisions about credit risk and move vulnerable customers onto the cheapest tariffs.  It will also allow us to offer an easy quoting and switching process – giving more accurate prices that mean no nasty bill surprises when you become a customer.  And it will mean that our ‘Rebels’ should have more, positive reasons to talk to us.

The conversation on Monday also discussed how innovation needed to be a key business driver in order to keep up with the pace of change.  Innovation is a key part of our DNA.  Creativity is one of our key values and we will be striving as a business to constantly innovate in the way that we, and the wider industry, does things – driving down costs, and improving the quality of our service.

We are creating a rebellion – big business can be good business.  Join us – be a rebel!