Utilities are including new digital products and services in their portfolio, leveraged on the technology that is being developed by digital dragons like Amazon, Google, and Tesla. This way, utilities are gaining ground across the most tech-savvy and eco-friendly customers. Discover the powerful capabilities that Smartflex delivers to utilities to help them build new revenue streams in record time and deliver more value to their customers in new ways.
Digital dragons are introducing new products and services into the utility market, providing customers with “plug-and-play” products, such as smart appliances and virtual assistants, which allow them to manage energy more efficiently at home. These companies also give customers better access to eco-friendly resources that they can use for energy generation and storage, including home batteries. Although these new digital products and services may appear as a threat to the traditional business model, utilities are identifying a valuable opportunity for revenue growth and customer experience improvement.
Utility companies are creating more competitive value propositions by integrating third-party offers to their portfolio. By doing this, utilities expect to maintain a progressively growing cash flow that will counteract stagnant energy sales and increase customer satisfaction by unifying multiple services onto one single bill. However, there are few enterprise solutions that allow service providers to implement this kind of initiative at the necessary pace.. Open’s holistic CIS solution, Smartflex, offers utilities a comprehensive set of capabilities to help them embark on new business lines, reduce time-to-market, and modernize customer experience. The solution works under a continuous delivery methodology so that utilities can rely on the functionalities they need to support emerging utility and digital services.
Smartflex offers a product catalog management application that simplifies the design of new core and digital products. By using this application, utilities can configure all the components that are part of a new or existing service, making it simpler to identify which components are provided by the utility or third-parties, and also enabling utilities to modify or replace components as needed. The application also allows service providers to model separate products and services to distinguish the utility’s offer from the third-party’s.
Smartflex also allows utility companies to create commercial offers, which specify the billing, financing, and payment terms policies that apply to each new product and service. With Open’s solution, utilities can implement multiple billing models, such as fixed rates for long-term energy contracts, fixed fees based on usage volume, TOU rates for electric vehicle charging, and premium rates for green energy subscriptions.
Smartflex allows utility companies to easily configure bundled deals by combining multiple commercial offers and discounts in a single package. This way, utilities can increase revenue through cross-selling, and end customers will be satisfied with more service options at lower costs. The solution’s flexibility provides the means to implement new revenue streams according to the utility’s plans and needs. Additionally, Smartflex’s easy-to-use design enables business users to implement new revenue initiatives without depending on the IT team, accelerating the rollout of new offers.
To assure that customers get the right offers on time, Smartflex includes a market segmentation tool. This tool allows utilities to reach particular groups of people with specific needs and wants by defining the characteristics of each market segment. These elements will automatically be evaluated by the system at the moment a CSR interacts with a customer, assessing which commercial offers are available for that specific user.
To eliminate the complexity of communicating with multiple third-parties and platforms, Smartflex includes a business process manager, which allows utilities to use preconfigured workflows or create new ones to define the processes that each engaged party must deliver. In the case of an eco-friendly customer that wants to become a prosumer, the business workflow will have the ability to control every step associated with the sale of solar panels and home batteries, from the initial home audit through equipment installation to billing. By using the business process manager, utilities can quickly implement changes to adjust its operation as new products and services are included in the company portfolio.
Smartflex offers an extensive set of flexible tools that help adapt to the new products and services that digital dragons are introducing in this new era.
