Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 8, 2018 - October 14, 2018

AS utilities embark on their digitalisation journey, they will need to focus their efforts on improving their relationship with customers by delivering a personalised customer experience.

That is what The Manila Electric Company (Meralco) — the Philippines largest electricity distributor — is currently doing, says its chief technology adviser Gavin D Barfield.

“Now is the time to invest heavily in customer experience. For example, the success of Amazon and Airbnb is because they have a direct and personalised relationship with their customers.

“Utilities do not really have that personal relationship with their customers, their customers are meters — not even a person.

“That is why we (at Meralco) are looking at online services which we have launched, to understand our customers more, and their demands. We are also looking at artificial intelligence chatbots so that we can have a conversation and build a relationship with customers,

“There are ways where we can give more targeted energy advice. For example, we can say to our customer, ‘Your refrigerator is using twice as much power this month compared to the last, maybe you should get it serviced.’

“This would not be a general statement but a specific statement built on data extracted from the customer’s home.

“That is where we are trying to push the energy efficiency side of it — by giving customers an accurate transparency of their electricity usage,” Barfield says during an interview with The Edge at the recently concluded Conference of Electric Power Supply Industry (Cepsi 2018), organised by Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB).

Barfield says investment from the utilities and regulatory approvals will be required in order for these technologies to be successfully implemented.

“Energy regulators would have to join us on this digitalisation journey. We need to ensure the technology that we roll out is suitable for all ranges of our customer.

“For example, we have implemented prepaid electricity using our smart metering to try to help customers with affordability problems — this gives our customer a regular update on how much power they are using, so that they can moderate their consumption behaviour to keep within the budget that they have uploaded onto their meter.

“We can see that really helps customer in not having to worry on how they are going to pay the bill,” he says.

Barfield says that using a smart metering infrastructure has proven beneficial to customers in the Philippines.

“We found that it has reduced energy consumption by 14% because people are much more conscious about how much they are using.

We have rolled out 100,000 smart meters this year, and have approval for 45,000 more in 2019,” he says.

The Philippines will play host to Cepsi in 2020, and a large delegation from the Philippines was seen at this year’s conference, with Meralco as one of the main exhibitors and a platinum sponsor of the conference.

“I think Malaysia is doing a fantastic job in setting a very high benchmark for Cepsi to follow and also it is a great opportunity for us to interact with suppliers and most importantly with other energy participants.

“This will be a great springboard for us to do more stuff with TNB. I hope this will be the start of a much closer relationship between Meralco and TNB.

“Certainly we can learn a lot of from them, and we have been very impressed with what TNB is doing and we are looking forward to see what technologies they are implementing,” Barfield says.

 

 

The Edge is the media partner for CEPSI 2018

 

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