The liberalized energy market faces its own challenges in terms of being competitive and responsive to the market demands and customer expectations, necessitating for energy suppliers to be innovative, to automate approaches and adapt existing processes so that a greater number of digital and self-service capabilities for clients are enabled.

The energy industry is rapidly digitalizing and many companies worldwide develop technology solutions to help energy retailers meet the current market requirements, and increase their operational efficiency.

Methodia’s “Utility & Telecom Suite” platform covers the entire process of customer acquisition, their service support, invoicing, asset and process management, marketing campaigns, as well as a customer self-service portal. The technological solution is based on years of experience in the international markets and is verified with customers all around the world. Therefore, the product comes “from the market”, satisfying the need for a completely new model in the industry and providing companies with a flexible and valuable solution for effective business management in the long run. The solution is based on 12 different modules managing frontend and backend processes.

In this article, we will present the main modules that energy retailers need, in order to manage internal and external processes, to improve their efficiency, and to attract potential new clients.

The implementation of a customer switching portal allows customers to start a process of switching to a new energy supplier step by step. This functionality offers a quick and easy process of attracting prospective business and residential clients. Thereby, potential customers can effortlessly provide information about their monthly energy consumption and launch an automated switching process to the chosen service supplier, as well as get forecast information for their bills and compare the prices with the current supplier.

The integration of a customer self-service portal enables businesses to reduce their costs for helpdesk centers, improve customer’s experience and increase customer’s engagement. It provides users with complete access to their consumption information, the possibility to review the current utility contract, as well as to change tariff plans depending on their personal preferences. A key feature for users is the ability to manually submit meter readings in the system, manage their profile information at any time, track invoices and payment history.

The broker portal is another powerful tool with functionalities that utility suppliers, energy consultants and brokers can use to generate and send quotes, contracts, manage price lists and various tariffs, receive information and reports about the commissions and overall performance. To boost sales performance, utility sales managers can create targets and assign tasks to their brokers.

The implementation of an automated billing system is an essential part of the accounting operations of both large and small enterprises supplying residential and business customers. By automation of key financial activities, the billing process is greatly facilitated, manual work is reduced and the possibility of errors is minimized. The system allows mass generation as well as cancellation of invoices, automatic calculation of VAT, creation of manual invoices, debit and credit notes, review and print of issued invoices, sending automatic reminders for overdue payments to users.

By utilizing innovative software, all processes for managing the data flows can be fully automated. The exchange of specific data files required to switch from one provider to another starts automatically when a request from the user is received in the system. Thus, energy suppliers can be sure that the data flows processes of acquiring a new customer contain the right information and the process will be completed successfully.