It used to be that when you have a monopoly on a market, you can sit back and just rake in the rewards without a care for the service you deliver or the state of customer satisfaction.
That may not hold up today. A study in the Journal of Marketing Research suggests customer satisfaction predicts profits at utilities, even if customers don’t have an option to switch if they are unhappy.
To help it navigate the rapidly changing market conditions, Meralco, the largest electricity distribution company in the Philippines, embarked on its digital transformation journey in 2020 with a solid data driven strategy to power customer centricity through data.
It implemented the Meralco Data Platform (MDP) to improve customer experience, service delivery, and operational efficiency. The MDP serves as the unified business intelligence and analytics platform that leverages its data to extract information and insights.
With an estimated 7.14 million (as of 2021) customer accounts in the Philippines, representing households, offices and factories that consume electricity daily, the utility company says it is committed to delivering service excellence – bringing safe, stable and reliable power to homes, businesses, and COVID-19 vital facilities.
“By unlocking the value of information to insights and harnessing the connected intelligence across Meralco, we bring to light where and how we can drive exceptional service to our customers, streamline our internal operations and create new opportunities for innovation - fully recognising the power of data as an enabler of business growth,” says Rocky D. Bacani, Meralco first vice president and head of information, communication, technology and transformation.
Meralco’s data-driven strategy plans to improve its data insights and drive innovation across the organization to further level up customer experience and operations.
The MDP replaces the company’s legacy data warehouse and provides data discovery, exploration, and self-service solutions to the strategic and operational data management pain points of Meralco.
Participating vendors in the MDP project include Dell Technologies, Talend, Cloudera, and Micro-D International.
Talend Data Fabric helps provide clean, complete, uncompromised data to the MDP, enabling advanced analytics, dashboards, and reporting capabilities that leverage enriched machine learning. Meralco also uses Talend to broaden data access and offer a self-service platform for business users to consume quality data. With Talend, Meralco has innovated and modernized its data infrastructure, supporting a new data lake, data warehouses, data science workbenches, and the rationalization of a business intelligence platform.
"The energy sector demonstrates that it is one of the most strategic industries for global economic recovery in this post-pandemic period," said JJ Tan, regional sales director Asia, Talend. "Meralco, with Talend, is treating data as an asset and working to extract as much value from it as possible. By embracing the power and capabilities of a modern data platform, Meralco is well placed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the markets and customers.”
