Devrim Celal, Chief Marketing & Flexibility Officer, Kraken.
Today, the industrial sector is responsible for around 40% of global energy use. However, commercial and industrial (C&I) accounts have been left behind by the wave of digital innovation that’s transforming experiences for residential customers. Properly engaging these notoriously complicated accounts is a pressing challenge for today’s energy transformation.
This is a golden opportunity to move into a new era of dynamic business-utility partnerships, unlocking a wealth of mutually beneficial innovation, trust and collaboration as portfolios continue to evolve. Critically, where legacy tech has long stood in the way of this transformation, utilities finally have the right tools to rise to the challenge.
Embracing The C&I Challenge
Servicing C&I customer accounts is complex, and supply contracts are only getting more sophisticated. A single business account can span hundreds or thousands of sites or outlets—each with different meters, pricing structures and terms. Add on‑site generation, storage systems, fleet charging and complex power purchase agreements (PPAs), and you get a formidable ecosystem requiring regular, site-specific changes to rates, contracts and a range of other moving parts.
Clunky legacy tech (often designed for residential customers and stretched uncomfortably to serve C&I) has forced business-customer service teams at utilities to stitch together spreadsheets, point solutions and fragmented conversations across different systems. The result has been slow onboarding, billing noise and manual interventions that risk getting things wrong. It’s also led to a broader lack of innovation—or participation in mutually beneficial flexibility schemes—and a service model that’s always one step behind.
The problem isn’t a lack of relevant data but that the data is often spread across multiple systems belonging to different software environments. Different teams often handle sales, pricing, contracting, enrollment, billing, collections and service in different systems with their own rules and timelines.
The burden of integrating and aligning all of these different systems means people end up reconciling information manually and chasing updates across teams. Small mismatches grow into disputes, and actioning changes to accounts often takes weeks when it should take hours or days.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Integrated digital journeys can reduce cost to serve, improve customer experience, boost innovation, reduce the risk of errors and create headroom to invest where it matters.
Realizing A Modern Approach To C&I Management
The solution is straightforward in concept and transformative in practice—connect the entire business customer life cycle in one unified, highly automated and highly configurable operating system.
When pricing, product setup, contracting, invoicing and support share a single source of truth, routine work runs on rails and exceptions stand out. Accuracy improves because validations are built into the flow. Complex changes are simpler because product teams can adjust terms and tariffs without writing new code. Compliance is easier because every step leaves an audit trail. A unified digital backbone lets you run consistent processes across the board while still handling the extra variables that C&I accounts bring.
While the vision is clear, the path forward is filled with familiar hurdles. For many retailers, the investment in new digital platforms is weighed against proving a quantifiable return on investment; CFOs and boards need confidence that these projects will drive measurable efficiency gains and risk reduction. Additionally, the painful memory of past migrations or failed attempts, a lack of localization and a limited understanding of the nuances of C&I can leave teams at all levels with change fatigue and a vague sense of dread.
Technical integration adds another layer of complexity, as modern systems must coexist with entrenched, bespoke infrastructure that’s shaped operations for decades. Without seamless integration, the risks of data fragmentation, costly manual workarounds and stalled projects are high.
Shifting internal culture can present its own challenge, as teams that have worked with siloed, manual processes for years can be hesitant to embrace new digital workflows (particularly when change feels like an optional IT upgrade rather than a business-wide transformation).
Systems must be able to unify customer data, automate the routine and offer the agility to adapt to evolving C&I demands. Retailers should be able to lower operational costs and reduce risk while unlocking the ability to deliver differentiated, value-added services to their most important business customers.
Case In Point
We worked with Good Energy, a U.K. supplier focused on renewables, so that its teams could work from one source of truth. After migration, the company reported a 32% drop in inbound business‑customer calls and a 50% reduction in time spent fixing billing issues. Billing performance stayed above 95% during the transition, and the move allowed its teams to improve service and build new offerings.
Business Energy Transformed
C&I customers have been underserved for too long. A modern, digitized approach to customer management can turn complexity into clarity, cut background noise and earn trust on both sides of the meter. Working from a single source of truth can allow for better service, smoother operations and more time to build for the future. That’s the opportunity in front of every utility, and it’s one worth taking now.
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