The Complete Guide to Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud

Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud is a dynamic management platform for all things in the energy landscape. Organizations can benefit from its personalized service, unified customer data, and business agility, and customers can benefit from a consistent customer journey, no matter what their expectations are.

Salesforce understands that the energy industry is constantly evolving, with new challenges like using sustainable practices and offering suitable solutions without massive costs. Energy & Utilities Cloud helps businesses bring these considerations and other processes together, ultimately streamlining what can be a very messy and disorganized operation.

What is Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud?

No matter which part of the energy landscape your organization fits into, Energy & Utilities Cloud probably has a solution. From power and utilities to oil and gas, and even further to green energy options, this Cloud keeps customer satisfaction in mind in different ways. This includes:

• Giving customers personalized service and apps based on their data.
• Using AI to further personalize their journeys.
• Offering the latest infrastructure, products, and services to customers whenever possible.
• Using data-driven tools to deliver quotes and rates faster.
• Helping customers to reach their energy goals with energy program adoption.
• Always looking for ways to increase customer trust by being transparent about sustainable energy choices.

Not only that, but Energy & Utilities Cloud also helps businesses to keep employees and stakeholders satisfied too – whether it be through the way they manage their data, or delivering safe, forward-thinking field operations. This includes:

• Making sure that there’s a high level of trust with stakeholders by being transparent about customers, suppliers, partners, and communities.
• Helping to deliver safe field operations by managing assets and work execution to reduce costs and risks.
• Also, ensuring worker safety with digital tools for training and upskilling.
• Leveraging analytics, integrations, and AI to power smarter, data-driven interactions.
• Managing partner and stakeholder relationships across different distribution channels.
• Improving plant efficiency whilst also lowering maintenance costs and downtime.

So, no matter whether your energy organization is looking for some help with customer service, marketing, data management, asset management, or pipeline streamlining – Energy & Utilities Cloud probably has what you’re looking for.

Why Use Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud?

The energy and utilities industry has seen its fair share of developments and challenges to overcome over the years. Most notably, the attitudes surrounding sustainable practices have become louder, signaling a global need to think more carefully about what kind of waste our energy sources produce.

Alongside this, technological advancements – particularly affecting decentralization, grid modernization, and energy storage – have also been something to adapt to.

Now, with the explosion of AI across a wide variety of sectors, we can see the energy and utilities industry getting smarter too. Everything from predicting demand to optimizing grid performance and detecting outages can now be done with AI as a helping hand. Digital platforms are also being used to connect consumers, prosumers, and energy companies.

Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud makes delivering the best results possible – all while taking the industry’s challenges and considerations into account. Global energy company ENGIE is a testimony of this. It uses Salesforce Customer 360 (Salesforce’s full portfolio of products, including Energy & Utilities Cloud) to unite data across sales, service, and IT teams and provide a single, shared view of every customer.

It can really be worth seeing if your organization can benefit from using Energy & Utilities Cloud, particularly if you have some targets around the aforementioned considerations to meet.

The Energy & Utilities Cloud Data Model

Much like the other industries’ clouds, the Energy & Utility Cloud’s data model acts as an additive or ‘extra layer’ on top of the existing Salesforce data model. It encompasses “everything needed for a cloud front-office system for energy and utilities marketing, sales and service in both competitive and regulated markets”.

Essentially, the data model covers sales, service, marketing, engagement, and management of assets across all residential, commercial, and industrial entities. It’s split into different subsets as well, with Advanced Pricing and Promotions, Contract, Customer Interaction, Order Management, Order Orchestration Plans, and Product Catalog alongside the main Customer Model. This is what links all your processes together.

Top Features

Now that we’ve learned a little bit more about what Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud is capable of, let’s take a closer look at some of its top features.

• Faster Distribution: We touched upon this a bit earlier, and with good reason. Quickly create quotes and rates for your customer with Multi-Site Quote and Order Capture to speed up the distribution process, no matter whether it’s a single customer or a large order.
• Customer Support: Support customers on a range of channels, or encourage digital self-service for quick resolutions.
• Smart Data: With data-driven forecasts and analysis, employees can make thoughtful, considered decisions across the business.
• Integration Made Simple: All integration happens on one platform, making it super easy and efficient.
• Support Across the Pipeline: Customers feel connected from the first contact to the end result with pipeline management tools and personalized insights.

Typical Integrations

Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud also has a number of integration options to maximize the user experience, with typical ones including:

• Sales or Service Cloud with Vlocity
• Communities with Vlocity
• Field Service Cloud with Vlocity
• Marketing Cloud
• Employee Mobile
• External CIS & Billing Systems
• Energy Efficiency and DSM Programs
• IVR/CTI/SMS
• eSignature

These are just some of the integrations available – for the full list, check out the official Salesforce Help page.

Vlocity Energy & Utilities Cloud Application Suite

If you want an even more specialized set of tools for your energy & utility needs, then the Vlocity Energy & Utilities Cloud Application Suite is always an option. This suite provides prebuilt modules and application components that act as another layer on top of the main Salesforce platform, and this Cloud. It enables energy suppliers and utility companies to set up a customer service platform that is a mixture of self-service options and a specialist agent console.

Essentially, it efficiently delivers the most-used business processes, and you can configure them to your business needs, potentially even with further integrations or extensions if required. Let’s have a look at what the different elements can do.

Energy & Utilities Contact Center Console

The Contact Center Console is a “unified desk portal for service agents”, providing the best of Salesforce’s 360-degree view possibilities for your customers.

Customer Acquisition Management

This is an out-of-the-box sales application that lets customers compare utility service rates. Any energy supplier or utility company can integrate this application into their customer portal and automate the process of acquiring new customers. Win-win!

Large Account Sales Management

This management tool helps utility companies to close deals faster and generally streamline and speed up the sales operations process. Sales agents and team leads are provided with actionable insights across their home, account, and opportunity pages, allowing them to focus on their top deals.

Salesforce CPQ helps to bring the sales process all together, and sales agents have a clear process for them from the minute they start working with an opportunity.

Utility Self-Serve Portal

Finally, this element is a customer service portal that allows customers to see their accounts in a 360 degree view. Here, they are guided through common tasks, and can manage their account history.

Summary

So that’s it! Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud is a powerful addition to the Salesforce platform, and it has plenty of tools that can help energy and utility companies manage their sales pipelines, collaborate with stakeholders, protect their employees, and effectively manage their customers’ data.

For more information on the cloud, including its pricing, check out its official Salesforce page.