In the last two installments of the five-part whitepaper, we discussed the six interlocking levers that will allow utilities to reinvent their operations. Those six levers inform and lay the foundations for five pillars that underpin a reinvented North American utilities operating model – and with these foundational pillars in place, utilities will be avoid fragmentation and inefficiency.
The transformation of customer experience (CX) in North American utilities goes beyond embracing technology. It involves instilling the ability to deliver customer trust, service agility and behavioral intelligence at scale. While vision, strategy and pilots are crucial, what truly distinguishes leadership from inertia is the ability to embed these capabilities into everyday operations.
Utilities that have historically excelled at infrastructure planning and asset management must now develop the same discipline in platform thinking, digital operations, and data-informed decision-making. This transformation is not a temporary initiative led by a transformation office. It becomes durable when institutionalized, and the organization truly ‘runs different’. So what are the foundational components of an operating system that sustains experience-led growth?
Many CX and digital initiatives in utilities remain stranded at the pilot, proof-of-concept, or vendor-led deployment stage. This is not due to lack of ambition or investment, but a lack of systemic scaffolding. Enterprises cannot scale what they have not structurally enabled. A reinvented operating model must be built on five enabling pillars:
These five dimensions are not aspirational – they are foundational. Without them, utilities will continue to generate disjointed experiences, wasted technology spend, regulatory reviews and disclosures.
Traditional utilities are structured around engineering domains – generation, transmission, distribution – as well as back-office functions, such as billing and marketing. Customer journeys, however, do not conform to this architecture.
For example, a customer that is relocating will:
Each step pulls on separate departments. In most utilities today, these existence of such silos leads to fractured interactions, rework and slow resolutions. Utilities must instead organize around customer journeys, not internal org charts. The solution is what high-performing companies call a ‘fusion team’: a cross-functional pod – comprising members drawn from IT, CX, operations, analytics and compliance – united by clear ownership of a mission-critical journey.
These teams do not replace functions – they unify them in agile task forces with the authority to experiment, release, and iterate in real time. Their incentives must be tied to journey KPIs, not just departmental mandates. UX designers, field ops planners, cybersecurity architect, and contact center managers must collaborate not only tactically, but with shared metrics: first-contact resolution, adoption, satisfaction, and effort.
“Fusion teams are the execution layer of reinvention. They collapse functional boundaries to deliver outcomes rather than handoffs.” Gartner, 2025 CIO Agenda for Power & Utilities1
Legacy utility systems – CIS, OMS, SCADA—are notoriously monolithic. They work well for stability but struggle with adaptability. To support dynamic CX, utilities must architect for fluidity.
This means moving away from tightly coupled systems toward composable, API-first, cloud-native architectures that allow microservices and digital capabilities to evolve without core disruptions.
Key architectural shifts include:
For example, a platform that allows a chatbot to access billing data, CRM history, and last outage report within milliseconds is more responsive and also less brittle than current middleware-heavy systems.
In summary, composable architecture reduces vendor lock-in, accelerates deployment cycles and improves time-to-value for new services. It also makes compliance reporting, DER onboarding and AI training more manageable.
Without trusted data, none of the reinvention levers function reliably. Whether deploying AI models, designing proactive alerts, or enabling personalized outreach, every journey depends on accessible, high-quality data.
Yet, most utilities still operate as fractured data ecosystems:
To overcome these blockers, leaders must invest in enterprise-grade data governance frameworks via:
A dedicated Data Office, operating with federated governance, can serve as the custodian of data capability-building – supporting both compliance (e.g. privacy, open data mandates) and business delivery. Equally vital is enterprise data literacy. Reinvention requires empowering every role, from call center agents to field engineers and marketers to understand, trust, and use data.
This is not optional. No amount of AI investment can deliver value without the foundation of data quality, trust, and culture.
“The ability of leadership to drive data and AI literacy will be one of the top three factors determining business strategy execution over the next five years.” – Canadian Electricity Association2
Developing a seamless experience ecosystem requires a unifying approach that links customer experience with frontline UX to employee tools (e.g. crew apps, IVRs) and experience cues, ensuring support agents and digital assistants have access to the same single source of truth. It also makes every interaction drive shared emotional and operational outcomes: speed, ease, and trust.
The Covid pandemic has taught us the importance and critical role played by an agent or employee in delivering an effective customer experience. The importance of their experiences matter as much as that of the customer. However, in most organizations the functions and organization structures that drive agent/employee experience (AX/EX), CX and user experience (UX) are siloed.
Gartner’s Total Experience (TX) framework is one such model that deliberately connects CX with AX/EX and UX in delivering a seamless experience ecosystem that is supported by technology.3 To implement this effectively, digital and contact center teams should be united under joint leadership, empowering them with design, analytics and technology capability.
OKRs should be used to drive continuous measurement, capturing not just whether a complaint was resolved, but also how a customer felt, how an employee responded and what data was triggered. High-friction processes (e.g. billing disputes, outage reporting, DER enrolment) should be mapped through both internal and customer lenses and redesigned to deliver joint value.
A seamless experience ecosystem makes human and digital experience inseparable, converting empathy into system design.
Transparency, not customer-facing efforts, is arguably the most pressing evolution impacting utility CX today. Utility commissions are now evaluating and approving rate increases not solely based on infrastructure needs, but also on validated customer experience performance.
This regulatory scrutiny necessitates a change in how CX is operationalized. CX metrics – such as Net Promoter Score, digital engagement, call resolution and energy equity – must now be auditable. Executive leadership must not only understand and oversee system reliability but also experience reliability. CIOs and CX leaders must proactively propose, track and defend customer-facing KPIs in regulatory submissions.
Leading utilities are already integrating CX insights into their Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs), ESG goals, and earnings mechanisms. This represents a long-overdue realignment, rewarding utilities not just for their assets but also for their service delivery.
Reinvention does not occur solely through pilots, programs, or personnel changes. It happens through the intentional redesign of how the utility operates, makes decisions, empowers teams, and measures success.
In the concluding part of our series, we assess a changing CX landscape where customers are not merely consumers of energy, but also producers and partners in the vast ecosystem – and offer clear direction to utilities executives looking to seize the opportunity to innovate.
References
1https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6214787
2https://www.electricity.ca/files/reports/english/CEA_DataToWisdom_EN.pdf
3 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4007537
