Energy CIO Insights Weekly Brief
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John Sinistaj, General Manager of Technology and Digital & CIO, Viva EnergyIrrespective of its sector, a business’ goal is to function effectively while utilizing its resources optimally. Driven by this conviction, the energy tech space has undergone a paradigm shift, and enterprises are now focussing on implementing advanced automation, leaving behind archaic technologies. These energy tech providers are developing solutions that enable intelligent automation of business processes. And at the same time, serving as a ‘partner’ that helps enable business outcomes and gain a competitive edge in the market.
Customer Oriented Automation
Today, customer experience is forming the core of most business strategies being employed in the market. Particularly in the energy sector, along with product experience, the consumer experience has become essential to ensure a company’s success. Solution providers have understood that only by diving into the intricate customer pain points, they can retain more customers. Alongside, data insights are soaring to become an imperative business practice in the market since the last decade. Industry experts are suggestive of deriving customer-related data to understand customers’ unattended needs in the market and then deploy a cutting edge technology to fulfill them. This is happening to the extent where the entire organization is starting to depend more and more on data-driven insights to further plan supply chain optimization, manufacturing processes, and customer-driven strategies.
Moreover, the influx of machine and process automation, robotics, IoT, and connected devices has infused efficiency into the process of deriving and accessing a company’s data. Energy tech management companies like Viva Energy are now able to extract greater amounts of customer data, which directly drives data insights and better business decision making. Energy companies are now strategically setting apart processes that can be automated and offered to customers in a self-service capacity. We do not have to necessarily sit and perform tasks ourselves or depend on call centers as customers are able to see information (order status, credit information, to name a few) in real time.
Making Strides in Agile Methodology
One of the other important trends that I am frequently seeing in the market today is the application of agile practices in delivering business and technology outcomes. Energy companies seem to be moving toward smaller chunks of delivery, which aims to provide concentrated attention to the intricacies of each shipment, every time. Businesses are working toward breaking down the activities in smaller segments by prioritizing every slab and bringing more efficiency in each of them. With this, we are moving away from the monolithic projects and technologies of the past, and focusing more on delivering high performing, and more enabling technologies, which are also speeding up the delivery. Not only is this empowering the workflow in the organization but it is also driving cost-effectiveness. For instance, we have worked with several business agencies to enable marketing automation and essentially bring mobility to their business process with our slew of end-to-end services. We assign teams with the right set of people and arsenal of technology to gather responses at the right speed. In some cases, we have also built digital teams off the ground to cater to the customized needs of our customers.
Advice for CIOs
The market for energy tech is massive and newer players are emerging regularly. Acquiring customers in a challenging market and managing margins can be a difficult task for any organization. The secret sauce of success that we have been using for years to seamlessly grow our customer base and upgrade ourselves is finding a niche around the customer experience and customizing the products and services accordingly, and I highly recommend that for other players in the market, irrespective of the scale at which they are operating. Knowing what draws and intrigues your customer can help you tread that extra mile and climb up the ladder of success faster. Secondly, data-driven insights are rousingly becoming important. With this, an organization can harness the right customer touchpoint, and tap into the unattended needs breeding in the market. The CIOs job is to be the driving factor for making these choices and then backing these choices with the right technology deployment and investments.
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