In my opinion, a utility’s brand is far more than a logo design and application, color palette, or creative platform. Your brand strategy should articulate your brand promise and define the optimal customer experience that you’re trying to deliver. It should also outline how your customers will experience your business and the impression you wish to create with each and every interaction.

Every contact channel and touchpoint should be deliberately designed and implemented with your brand promise and the optimal customer experience in mind. This applies to every piece of marketing collateral, every employee interaction, every customer service interaction, and every transaction (automated or with an employee).

It’s important for utilities to understand that their brand is the sum total of the customer experiences they’re delivering. Improving those experiences will help inspire loyalty; improve customer satisfaction scores; reduce operating costs; and successfully increase paperless billing adoption, self-service channel usage, and demand-side management program participation.

I’ve found that by treating their brand strategy as the foundational first step in improving the experiences they’re delivering to their customers, utilities are seeing stronger executive buy-in and acceptance across the organization. If you’re treating customer experience as a one-time project intended to create operational efficiencies, you run the risk of being inconsistent and perhaps damaging your brand.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. Does your utility have a clearly articulated brand strategy that’s reinforced through every customer interaction?