Originally published on ASUG
Founded in 1931, Southwest Gas Corporation (SWG) is a leading natural gas provider across Arizona, Nevada, and California that serves 2.2 million customers. The company is committed to delivering safe, reliable, and sustainable energy.
As a well-established and trusted utility provider for more than 90 years, SWG has strived to continuously revolutionize how they deliver customer experience for increased customer satisfaction. The definition of customer experience in the utility sector is changing, with forces such as rising environmental concerns, growing competition, evolving technologies, and increasing regulatory pressures driving utilities to become digital organizations.
Utilities are experiencing a paradigm shift in digital customer engagement with increased consumer demands for self-service platforms, 24/7 access to utility services, and personalized omnichannel interactions. Faced with rapidly evolving customer expectations, SWG underwent a comprehensive transformation to elevate customer experience.
The Situation
SWG recognized that its existing systems were insufficient to meet customers’ growing demand for digital-first experiences. The company understood it required an advanced solution to unify customer interaction and integrate seamlessly with workforce management processes. Married with tech change and an evolving ecosystem, the gas provider needed to flex its innovation muscle and power through a digital transition — one that is continuous and consistent.
Internally, regulatory pressures, growing competition, and environmental concerns defined a new digital ecosystem for utilities. Additionally, a strong emphasis on data security drove SWG to prioritize safeguarding sensitive customer information such as payment channels and financial details.
The company aimed to build on its SAP infrastructure, leveraging it as a central repository for customer data and workforce operations while allowing for the integration of cutting-edge technologies like AI and automation.
With customers expecting real-time communication, accessibility, and mobile-first capabilities, SWG needed a modernized AI platform to deliver a more personalized customer experience. The company identified the following focus areas:
- Advanced omnichannel interaction services for customers
- Intuitive, interactive, and robust account management enabling a hassle-free customer experience
- Intelligent analytics for driving personalized engagement based on customer behavior
- Integrated customer journeys across multiple touchpoints for seamless service delivery
The utility kickstarted a multi-year transformation journey with SEW and SAP with a goal to deliver 5-star customer experiences and set industry benchmarks in the new utility-customer relationship paradigm.
The Initiative
In partnership with SEW and SAP, SWG embarked on a journey to implement a comprehensive digital CX platform, SEW’s SAP Self Service Accelerator (SSA)., SWG reviewed how the platform would integrate with its existing SAP infrastructure. Ensuring its compatibility — including with S/4HANA — was a priority.
“What it really came down to is the collaboration, and I would say the integration between SEW and SAP was the main driver for Southwest Gas. We looked for a product that was well integrated with SAP, and we selected SEW because of that integration,” said Raied Stanley, Vice President, Chief Information Officer at SWG.
The integration between SEW and SAP was the main driver for Southwest Gas.
SEW’s SAP Self Service Accelerator (SSA)offers real-time, multichannel communication and allows customers to manage accounts, billing, and service requests, providing utilities with a 360-degree view of customer interactions. Additionally, SEW’s upcoming Energy Efficiency Module will deepen customers’ ability to monitor and control their energy usage through outage reporting, electric vehicle management, and energy consumption analytics. This component will empower SWG in its regulatory compliance and sustainability efforts.
Throughout the implementation process, SWG focused on ensuring the platform could handle high traffic volumes and deliver timely responses. Outage management, billing integration, and the Tech-en-Route functionality, which allowed customers to track field technician arrival time, improved transparency and procedural efficiency.
The integration enhanced the data flow between the customer-facing platform and SAP, becoming a single source of truth for customer data. Updated in real-time and fed directly into SAP, the new system improved accuracy and consistency across all customer touchpoints. The system’s reliability meant minimal downtime outside of scheduled maintenance.
By the end of the multi-year digital transformation initiative, SWG was equipped with the tools to deliver top-tier customer experiences and streamline operations, resulting in a more responsive, efficient, and transparent service delivery.
The Results
The new Digital CX platform delivered immediate and measurable benefits to SWG and its customers. With this success, Southwest Gas has firmly established itself as a trendsetter for customer experiences in the energy and utility industry. It is a significant achievement for a digital-first, customer-centric organization that other industry players can look up to.
SWG’s digital platforms are setting new benchmarks for the industry, from utility account management, billing and payments, service management, notifications, and alerts to outage management. They are garnering customer recognition, making it the #1 utility platform with 5-star ratings across the App Store and Google Play Store. Additionally, Southwest Gas’ J.D. Power scores for digital channels continued to rise, further demonstrating the positive impact of the new platform on customer satisfaction.
The MyAccount platform provides a one-stop solution for residential customers and agency users, helping them manage their utility accounts. The feature-rich customer platform offers the following:
- Secure Registration and Login: Two-step authentication process for secure new customer registrations. Easy and seamless logins are supported across mobile app and website customer interfaces.
- Digital Account Management: Users can manage multiple accounts, provide access to guest users, and edit user information such as username, mobile phone, email address, password, and more.
- Billing and Payments: Customers can view their current gas bill, view billing and payment history, make payments via available payment methods, enroll in a customized payment arrangement or payment plans, and make donations to Energy Share.
- Usage Tracking and Management: Provides customers the ability to view and analyze periodic consumption. Allows historic energy comparisons, encouraging active energy efficiency.
- Proactive Notifications: Provides real-time, two-way communication to customers through text, push, and emails regarding payments, outages, rebates, and savings programs.
- Service Management: Allows customers to raise and manage service requests to transfer existing gas services, stop gas service at a specific address, verify service, quickly access payment details, and download letters of credit from another utility company.
- Outage Notifications: Actively provide a detailed view of current and planned outages via map view with restoration updates.
- Efficiency: Provides personalized plans to customers to make their homes more energy-efficient and reduce energy costs.
- Tech-En-Route: Delivers an uber-like experience, empowering customers to track their field technician on the way to their property via an intuitive map view in real-time.
- Agency Pledge Information: The customer service team can view detailed customer information and pledge information, as well as edit existing pledge details and create a new pledge.
The platform enhanced operational efficiency by integrating workforce management tools with customer-facing processes, leading to faster service completion and lower operational costs. By automating several manual processes and centralizing data, the platform powers data-driven decision-making and enhances the service agent experience with a complete view of all customer touchpoints. Finally, with more routine customer inquiries now managed through the platform, SWG could reallocate resources to more complex customer service issues.
The days of calling a utility and sitting on hold for 45 minutes are long gone. The days of sitting at home waiting eight hours for a technician to show up or a gallon to show up are kind of over,” said Stanley. “The simplification of self-service is important
Overall, the platform is a scalable solution that addresses procedural inefficiencies that can accommodate future innovations, all while receiving industry-leading customer satisfaction scores.
Lessons Learned
Several insights spring from SWG’s customer-driven digital transformation that could shape future tech and customer service initiatives. These lessons reflect the importance of building seamless customer experiences, improving data governance and management, and personalizing services to meet consumers’ needs.
As SWG learned, having multiple customer-facing systems or apps can lead to disjointed experiences and inconsistent data management. “Always focus on that single source of truth for each customer,” said Stanley, noting that having three or four different apps becomes a hindrance. For SWG, centralizing customer data within SAP ensured that every interaction was based on accurate, up-to-date information.
Always focus on that single source of truth for each customer
Meanwhile, the initiative highlighted the benefits of creating a dynamic customer profile that allows customers to update their personal information, such as emails or addresses, without unnecessary hurdles or inefficiencies. “There’s no reason a customer should have to call or go somewhere else to update their email. Just update it in the app, and it should feed SAP in real time,” noted Stanley.
In a similar vein, personalization was identified as a potential area for improvement. The all-too-common occurrence of customers receiving generic letters or irrelevant promotions, such as messaging encouraging a switch to gas when they already had gas service, is quickly becoming a thing of the past. SWG can provide more meaningful, targeted customer interactions by gaining an understanding of specific customer’s needs.
Data governance also emerged as a priority. “There’s a lot of regulation around what happens with customers’ credit card or checking information. Where do you put it? How do you store it? How do you manage it?” Stanley explained while discussing the critical considerations of effective data management and security. Proper governance is essential for meeting regulatory requirements, protecting privacy, and maintaining customer trust.
These aspects underpin an effective modernization strategy centered on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. While the immediate impacts of the new platform have yielded benefits for customers and the organization alike, SWG leaders continue to seek new opportunities to apply experience-driven insights to future endeavors.
