Utility and Anti-Churn: how to increase retention rate with Artificial Intelligence
In today’s liberalized and hyper-competitive energy market, one of the biggest challenges for utilities is to lower the churn rate. We have already discussed in this article how important it is to keep customers loyal to your brand, not only in terms of brand image, but also and above all in reference to company turnover. Today we will try to define how and why a utility today can succeed in retaining its consumers while increasing its revenues and without significantly affecting costs.
Up until a few years ago, suppliers of electricity, water and gas did not place the user at the center of their business and they were not concerned by the perception conveyed to consumers, which was very often cold and distant. But the situation of the market at the time, essentially monopolistic and characterized by almost zero competition, allowed it.
Today, however, the energy sector has totally changed. Following a rapid liberalization process that has multiplied the players on the market, a new type of competition has emerged based not only on prices, but also and above all on the ability of each company to involve customers by focusing on a strong brand identity that responds to the increasingly particular needs of consumers. The center is no longer the company, but the customer. The latter is strong today because it is free to change its supplier at any time, even simply because it is “philosophically” close to it. Indeed, it is no coincidence, in fact, that the messages conveyed by utilities to differentiate themselves from their competitors are increasingly based on the choice of a particular vision of the world (today largely based on a turn towards green and ecological), rather than on effective superiority in terms of products or services.
This revolution of the energy market results, like many others, from the digital one which has been changing every area of human life for years. New technologies allow companies to equip themselves with innovative tools capable of satisfying the needs of each customer in ways that until recently would have been impossible. One of these is Artificial Intelligence, which more and more companies rely on to be able to set up strategies capable of solving their critical issues quickly and efficiently.
In the specific case we are dealing with, that is the energy market and its fight against churn, Artificial Intelligence finds a perfect application since it gives companies the possibility to analyse their customer base in a very short time, highlighting the points on which they need to work to improve customer retention.
Thanks to it, it becomes possible to identify in advance those users with the highest risk of abandonment and proactively set up personalized loyalty plans for them according to individual needs. In this way, the customer becomes the fulcrum around which the company project revolves, a fundamental part of the change that the company is the spokesperson for, thanks to the customers’ choice.
But how is it possible to implement Artificial Intelligence within your company?
With BigProfiles, whose Artificial Intelligence Platform allows you to carry out, in a very short time and without any knowledge of coding, in-depth analyses of your customer base to set up strategies capable of increasing retention and decreasing the churn-rate, positively impacting company costs and revenues.
Would you like to know more? Request a free demonstration with one of our consultants!