How to Increase Operational Efficiency in the Energy Market

Energy supply companies in the UK are faced with multiple challenges. As well as increased competition from disruptor and new suppliers, they have ever increasing burdens of new regulations and tariff caps putting strains on profit margins.

As such, increasing operational efficiency in any energy supply business is key to sustainability. As they say, every penny saved is a penny earned. Here are some top tips for increasing operational efficiency in an energy supply company in the least stressful manner.

Having a strong customer focus is a must when working in an industry as competitive as energy supply. Retaining customers requires far less of an investment than attempting to acquire new ones, both in marketing budget and in human resources. By striving to create a culture that is constantly focused on going above and beyond customer expectations, problems can be resolved faster and customer satisfaction will soar.

While no part of customer service should be ignored, learning to prioritise for the highest levels of customer satisfaction is crucial. Understanding where your customers’ pain points are is a great place to start; knowing where they need more help and where they don’t will ensure your resources are targeted at the most important processes.

Having engaged employees who are invested in company performance is crucial. It’s all very well introducing new procedures and policies from the director's office, but those on the ground are the only ones who will be able to spot when and how to do things better. Empowering employees to make changes where necessary and to feed into the operational side of the business will enable you to make the right changes at the right time.

Following on from the point above, ensuring your employees feel safe to raise criticisms is a great way to highlight inefficiencies as well as helping them feel more engaged with the business. Procedures that work well on paper may not perform the best in practice, so ensure you have a mechanism for allowing critical analysis from the people delivering your service in the real world.

Standing back and looking at how your energy supply company is processing various tasks can often highlight ingrained inefficiencies. Is there something one department is doing that is already being done by another? Would departments benefit from shared knowledge and resources? Can you reduce the number of steps in any given process? By integrating various workflows into a centralised operation, you can relieve the burden on all involved and drive down replication of tasks.

Knowing how you are doing against a given set of performance indicators can help you capitalise on achievements. Having a robust CRM and energy billing solution in place with measurable factors and insightful analytics will help to highlight where things are going well, and where they can be improved. As such, you can direct resources to the most useful areas and pull them back from those processes that are not so critical.

In today’s digital age, this one almost goes without saying. However, you’d be surprised at how many energy supply companies are still using paper based records for numerous processes. Technology has the ability to simultaneously improve customer service and reduce demands on human resources, but it needs to be tailored to the needs of that business. Automation is great, but not at the cost of customer relationships, so make use of new tech in only well thought out ways.

When you’re running a small energy supply company, you’re not expected to be an expert at everything. When it makes sense to do so, there is no shame in outsourcing specific tasks to specialists who are equipped to do them better than anyone in your workforce. Non-core activities such as managing your social accounts, marketing and suchlike can be handed over to an expert, leaving your staff to get on with what they do best.

Think about what your company wants to achieve, both short and long term, and start formulating specific and achievable goals to help you on your way. Whether these relate customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, billing errors or something else will be down to you, but by setting specific goals and reaching them you’ll boost employee engagement and make steps towards your ultimate goals.

Efficiency in energy supply companies is a key consideration, no question about that. Greater efficiencies can lead to increased profits and happier customers. However, knowing when to stop is also key. Focusing too much on efficiency can begin to overshadow other business goals, so it’s critical to recognise when you’ve done enough for now and to just get on with it!

For more help in making your energy supply company more efficient or any other aspect of how to start an energy supply company , get in touch with us today and we’ll be pleased to help.