When it comes to customer experience (CX), North American utilities – whether electric, gas, water or energy service providers – have been long insulated from external pressures to innovate. So long as the grid functioned, customers tolerated average service, paper-heavy communications and limited personalization. That passivity is now changing as customer expectations evolve in our post-digital world, and those utilities that take proactive steps to disrupt the status quo will reap benefits in the years ahead.
When it comes to customer experience (CX), North American utilities – whether electric, gas, water or energy service providers – have been long insulated from external pressures to innovate. So long as the grid functioned, customers tolerated average service, paper-heavy communications and limited personalization. That passivity is now changing as customer expectations evolve in our post-digital world, and those utilities that take proactive steps to disrupt the status quo will reap benefits in the years ahead.
Today, customer expectations have shifted. Conditioned by seamless digital experiences in banking, entertainment, health and retail, they now expect interactions that are convenient, personalized, proactive and empathetic. They want utilities not just to deliver power or water, but to offer them control over costs, services, environmental choices and communication preferences.
The reality, however, is that utilities continue to fall short of those expectations due to legacy systems and outdated assumptions regarding customer needs. According to data from J.D. Power, mobile apps, consistently the highest-rated channel across industries when it comes to customer satisfaction, are missing from nearly 30% of providers.1 Digital experience scores for utilities in North America average just 594 out of 1,000, a full 100 points lower than comparably regulated industries like insurance and finance. In Canada, utility customer experience (CX) performance reached a five-year low of 52.9 in 2024, the worst score across all sectors tracked by Forrester.2
This shortfall creates a trust gap that erodes brand equity. This gap not only increases the cost to serve, but also erodes support for new services and undermines participation in grid-enhancing programs. Furthermore, it increasingly affects a utility’s ability to raise rates and recover investments.
Historically, utility performance was measured by infrastructure reliability, outage reduction and capital efficiency. CX was considered a necessary but secondary spoke in the wheel, important to manage complaints, but not strategic to the business model. That equation has changed.
Today, regulators, commissions and public utility boards are aligning more closely with customer expectations. In states like California, Texas, and New York and Canadian provinces such as Ontario, explicit CX metrics are being used as part of rate-setting processes. Digital engagement rates, complaint trends and satisfaction scores are increasingly determining whether rate increases are approved. For example:
Far from being soft metrics, poor CX ratings now carry direct financial consequences for utilities. A missed benchmark in respect of outage communications or self-service resolution can delay approval or reduce future rate adjustments.
This creates a new mandate and a new risk. Utilities that persist in operating service channels and digital tools as operational necessities, rather than business assets, are jeopardizing not just satisfaction, but trust, growth and financial flexibility.
Over the past decade, numerous reports, consultancies and internal vision documents have made the same recommendations: digitize customer service, integrate data, personalize proactively and modernize your communication stack. Yet progress remains uneven at best. The reasons for this chronic underperformance are structural and cultural:
These deep organizational constraints have contributed to a phenomenon best described as “transformation without reinvention”. New tools are layered onto old workflows. Chatbots are deployed without human escalation paths. AI pilots are launched in isolation, with no enduring impact on journeys or service design. The result: a patchwork of underperforming technologies, rising customer frustration and swelling costs.
Beneath the performance metrics and digital gaps lies a more fundamental shift: customers evaluate utilities not solely based on service reliability, but also on the quality of their relationships. When utility customers are surveyed about their preferences, they do not seek extraordinary solutions. Instead, they prioritize the following:
Regrettably, many utilities continue to fall short in meeting these expectations. Ironically, meeting these requirements is not predicated on disruptive innovation: rather, it demands intentional investment, empowered leadership, contemporary capabilities and a shared understanding of what constitutes success.
Digitizing processes, upgrading portals and launching AI pilots are incremental modernization efforts, not strategic reinvention. True CX reinvention involves utilities fundamentally reimagining themselves as platforms for empowerment and value delivery, by recreating their operating model, culture, and capabilities to align with customer expectations in real time.
In this series, we propose six interlocking levers that must be coordinated – not in sequence or in isolation – to support this reinvention.
Collectively, these shifts allow a utility to move from an infrastructure provider focused on flow and uptime, to a trusted energy partner focused on insight, interaction, and shared value. The time for reinvention is now – the customer is no longer behind the meter. They are beyond it, expecting more.
In the next installment of this five-part series, we explore how North American utilities can eliminate friction at the edge, augment agents as workforce multipliers, and exploit intelligence at the core to operate to differentiate in the current and forecasted environment in order to efficiently and effectively support customers’ increasingly complex inquiries and heightened user and personalization expectations.
References
1 https://blog.jdpa.com/globalbusinessinsights/lagging-digital-satisfaction-is-bringing-utilities-down
2 https://www.forrester.com/report/the-canada-utilities-cx-index-rankings-2024/RES181314
3 https://www.oeb.ca/regulatory-rules-and-documents/rules-codes-and-requirements/handbook-utility-rate-applications
4 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6214787
