2 weeks ago

What Is Salesforce Energy and Utilities Cloud?

 

The Salesforce Industries Energy & Utilities Cloud provides utility companies and energy retailers with industry-specific capabilities that enable them to deliver outstanding new customer experiences while increasing operational efficiency. 

The Energy & Utilities Cloud solution is built on top of the Salesforce platform to assist businesses in achieving operational excellence while lowering development and customization costs.

Table of Contents

• What Is the Energy and Utilities Cloud?
• Who Can Use It?
• Common Use Cases
• What Makes Salesforce Energy and Utilities Customer-Centric?
• Why Scalefocus?
• Key Takeaways

 

What Is Energy & Utilities Cloud?

The Salesforce Energy and Utilities Cloud is an industry-specific solution built on the world’s leading CRM platform. It is designed to elevate the customer experience and automate complex business processes like Order and Asset Orchestration while maintaining all customer and operational data on the same platform. 

The Energy and Utilities Cloud adds value to the CRM with predefined Industry objects. Developers and Consultants can utilize process templates and components for complex business scenarios instead of investing time in heavy custom logic.

The solution includes:

– OmniChannel Service: The Utility 360 Console allows Energy retailers and Regulated Utilities to use Contact Center and customer service platform with an at-glace view of all customer interactions. These include Usage, Offers, Billing, Invoicing, and recent phone and email communication. 

– OmniChannel Sales allowing utility companies to streamline sales for single and multi-site accounts optimized to protect margins. 

– Products, Offers, and Quotes to help businesses configure personalized offers and quotes for commodity and non-commodity services from a unified catalog. 

– Contract Management for fastercontract creation and better regulatory compliance with a unified clause library. 

– Order and Enrollment to help automate and orchestrate the enrollment and service delivery lifecycle management. 

– Field Service Management: Utility companies looking to transform their service beyond the contact center can optimize the agent and in-person field service experience and appointment scheduling. To do that, they need to combine the Energy & Utilities Cloud and data model with Salesforce Field Service Cloud.

Who Can Use It? 

The Energy and Utilities Cloud supports equally well B2B and B2C processes. In Business-to-business relations, the Commercial and Industrial Sales/Account manager is responsible for on-time, accurate and detailed customer interactions. 

The OmniChannel Sales solution allows for the development of comprehensive quotes based on a unified product catalog with automated pricing, product compatibility and penalty rules. Quoting for multiple locations is possible through the multi-location quote functionality together with a strict built-in account hierarchy.

Service agents at Energy Retailers are empowered by the Utility 360 Service Console, where all end-customer information is tracked and stored. Contact center operators can easily and quickly respond to any customer inquiry about usage, billing, and invoicing. Any upselling opportunities such as new product offers, changes of plans, and special promotions can be handled through the Console.

Business customers can benefit from multi-location quotes, accurate quotations, and contract negotiation process. All quotes and contracts are generated in Salesforce and can be revised, negotiated, emailed, and e-signed without leaving the platform. Retail customers can navigate through self-service portals, submit inquiries, open disputes and have access to all of their usage, billing, and invoicing information.

Common Use Cases 

Energy and Utilities companies face high operational costs and constant demand for great customer service experience. For organizations with heavy investments in custom-built billing, back-office, and customer support systems modernization could be a lengthy and expensive initiative. 

Having different systems for different business processes creates information silos and makes it difficult for the IT organization to support the software and hardware environment. Energy & Utilities is a natural Salesforce Cloud solution that offers a massive library of predefined components and automations that can cost thousands of hours in Business Analysis and custom development. 

Energy Retail organizations face pressure to provide creative bundled offers for new products and services to their residential consumers. Liberalization of residential consumer energy markets dictates new business processes for energy services and products.  

The OmniChannel Sales and Utility 360 Console of the Energy & Utilities cloud provides features like Industry CPQ and Intelligent Contact Center to help Energy Retailers meet the demand for increased customer satisfaction and .  

What Makes Salesforce Energy and UtilitiesCustomer-Centric?

Energy and utility companies typically resell utilities such as water or electricity that they purchase from different virtual providers under identical conditions and similar prices. In such a highly competitive environment, a company can choose among numerous providers and easily switch them with a very short notice period.

The real differentiator here is the end user and their customer experience, and this is where Salesforce for Energy & Utilities enters the picture. Data is crucial, and Salesforce provides users with the latest information regarding discounts, repair work schedules, outages, etc. 

It also facilitates changing the customer address or tariff plan and provides additional services. Customers can compare current consumption and expenses with past events, manage payment dates and deferred payments, et al. This is one of the most significant advantages of Salesforce – it allows E&U companies to be customer-centric while simultaneously maintaining field service teams and vendor management.  

Why Scalefocus? 

Our industry-focused development teams have crafted for Energy & Utility giants, like data management software, advanced ETRM platforms, and top-notch analytical and forecasting tools that help organizations to make more informed decisions, streamline their operations and maximize profits.

Team Scalefocus has based its expertise on systematically tackling the platform challenges and keeping up with the latest features and updates. Our learning and training processes have greatly benefited from our partners’ business cases and best business practices. These help us build upon our experience to accumulate a remarkable database of priceless knowledge.

Energy models are rapidly changing, and the decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization trends (also known as the 3 D’s of the Energy market) mean structural changes for Energy & Utilities providers. Scalefocus helps companies update, improve, and digitalize their business processes and solution ecosystems to successfully reduce their carbon footprint and diversify energy sources. Our digital-first solutions in trading, supply chain, investor relations, and asset management set the foundation for the seamless digital transformation of Energy & Utilities companies.

Conclusion 

Salesforce Energy & Utilities cloud is an off-the-shelf industry best practice solution. It can solve specific digital challenges in business units like Contact Centers, Commercial & Industrial (C&I) account management, or key account groups. Built on top of Salesforce, it extends the CRM capabilities with industry-specific components and automation to save time and effort in complex customizations and business logic.  

The Salesforce experts at Scalefocus have a proven track record of collaboration with Energy & Utilities companies and numerous cloud computing projects that have dramatically improved our partners’ efficiency.

Do not hesitate to contact us and have a chat with our team. We’ll be happy to discuss your projects and leverage our expertise to help you meet your business objectives.