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2023 Energy and Utilities Solution Trends, and DistribuTECH Recap 

2023 Energy and Utilities Solution Trends, and DistribuTECH Recap Author: Drew Tramel 

In February, we attended DistribuTECH 2023 in San Diego, California.  We feel there is a lot of value for our clients and partners in sharing a short event recap, along with some of the solution trends we’ve been seeing for energy and utilities. 

DistribuTECH 2023 

This entire event is geared toward electricity distribution and transmission, and is great for keeping up with industry-specific solutions, solution components, and trends. That said, some of the information we picked up from both networking and the event itself is useful for energy and utilities projects in general. 

Case in point, we were able to attend a partner panel for Salesforce’s Energy & Utilities Cloud. While the main focus was adapting it for electricity utility use cases and pain points, if you’re in the energy and utilities sector, you’ll recognize the need for some of the functionality it provides; for example:  

  • Digitalization and modernization to increase efficiency, employee retention, and a business’ ability to keep and grow skills on their teams 
    • Streamlining workflows to make things as fast and simple as possible 
    • Integration of prefilled forms 
    • Gamification of data and user input 
    • Ensuring tasks don’t have to be repeated 

This is one of the industry-specific products Salesforce offers which we’ve implemented for clients previously. Its tools, along with the Salesforce platform’s capabilities, work towards meeting cross-industry needs — and can be adapted to meet organizational and industry-specific requirements.  

  • Salesforce is leaning into industry-specific cloud development because they’re a faster, more thorough way to meet some of those requirements out-of-the-box 

Before we move on to trends, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to meet with us — and shout outs to Jola Marvel at Salesforce for running a great panel and Ty van den Akker from our partner Locana. These events are always busy for everyone, and they both took the time to catch up and talk through value-adding project strategy.  

Energy and Utilities Solution Trends 

Putting together what we’ve seen at DistribuTECH and other events, what we’re hearing from clients and partners, and reviewing overall market trends — there are several areas of focus becoming more common when it comes to energy and utilities solutions. 

  • Trend: Leveraging machine learning and AI to improve customer relationships and the customer experience 
    • What We’re Seeing: A push to extend Salesforce AI and analytics to other areas of an organization’s business; Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud (which can be used for customer portals) are becoming popular solution components 
      • Namely for their ability to help organizations get in front of issues, communicate, offer customers quick information, and tailor the customer experience 
  • Trend: Customer and employee databases for self-help and faster case resolution  
    • What We’re Seeing: Salesforce configuration and tools being used to allow for more forward-thinking action; again, this is about getting in front of problems and stopping issues before they happen 
  • Trend: Integrated asset management and looking at asset management’s impact on other areas of the business 
      • Bringing asset management on platform is low-hanging fruit as far as addressing a lot of pain points — it makes customers happy, it makes employees happy, it saves businesses money, and it improves processes in the field, and both the front and back office 
  • Trend: Next-generation outage management tools and solution integration 
    • What We’re Seeing: Better, faster, smarter alerts and applications used for outage related process management; this is a clear sign that digital solutions are becoming the norm, and its great news for both customers and businesses 

Meeting Your Organization’s Solution and Business Goals 

If you missed us at this year’s DistribuTECH, want to talk solution trends, you’re trying to add value and ROI to your Salesforce solution, or you’re looking for a new way to meet your organization’s goals — contact us.   

If you’re a Click 8.3 user and want more information before reaching out: