Three out of four P&Us we interviewed claimed to have a strong vision for smart and a differentiating value proposition for customers. But very few consumers in our research understood this. The messages are not getting through.

We asked P&U leaders in 12 countries what impact they thought smart consumers will have on their business, what changes and opportunities they thought will arise, and how they plan to adapt and win in new markets.

We found a global consensus on two key points:

1. that smart will bring about big change in the industry; and
2. that customers sit at the heart of this change.

P&Us also had similar objectives for smart; the most highly-rated were improving customer care, improving customer-related business processes and creating new business.

But there's a problem. To meet these objectives, utilities need to win the hearts and minds of their customers. This will be difficult given the serious gaps between what P&Us think customers want from smart, and what customers actually think and feel. The most significant disparities were about perceptions of:

• The energy supplier/customer relationship: This was the most fundamental problem: lack of trust. When asked about customer perceptions, P&Us in every country believed they were trusted and offered good value for money. Yet 75% of the people participating in our consumer research said their relationship with their energy supplier was negative, and the rest were indifferent. Not one consumer group rated the relationship as positive.
• What consumers want from smart: While utilities often assume consumers are passive buyers and uninterested in energy apart from saving money, consumers value the way smart meters make energy use easier to understand and increase their control over personal consumption. This circle of misunderstanding must be broken if utilities are to succeed in smart.

Circle of misunderstanding


• Which smart services consumers want, and who they will buy them from: Some of the services P&Us plan to offer are ones that consumers would not choose to buy from their energy suppliers because they don't trust them, or ones they are not interested in.

Ultimately, these differences could lead to investment being wasted if the wrong services are offered, or even if the right services are offered and consumers don't trust the utilities offering them.

To learn more, read our report, The rise of smart customers: how consumer power will change the global power and utilities business (what the sector thinks).