6 Strategies for Australian Energy Providers to Improve Customer Experience in 2025

Customers in Australia now expect energy providers to deliver the same simple, transparent, and personalised experiences they get from their banking and internet providers.

The reliability of your services still matters, but it is no longer enough to keep customers from switching if they have a bad experience with your brand. Plus, with Better Energy Customer Experiences (BECE) reforms in progress, now is the time to modernise your services, remove friction, and gain the loyalty of your customers.

In this article, we’re going to explain the trends shaping customer expectations, some strategies to improve yours, and how Salesforce can help your teams move faster and deliver a better experience.

Key topics we are going to cover:

• Customer experience is now the key differentiator in a digitally savvy energy market.
• BECE reforms reflect the rising expectations of customers.
• Providers can build loyalty using modern software and personalised service.

In March 2025, Energy Ministers across Australia backed a new plan called Better Energy Customer Experiences, or BECE . The plan is designed to give consumers better service as the energy market changes.

The consultation for this process looked at how to update the rules so they match the way consumers actually use electricity and gas.

From this work, these priorities emerged:

• Clear and fair rules: Protections should cover all customers, including those using newer energy services like solar and battery storage.
• Better support for people in hardship: Customers should have access to more payment options, and there should be real consequences for providers who fail to follow the rules.
• Fair treatment for all: Equal access to support for people in apartments, retirement villages, or other embedded networks.
• Transparency: Plain-language pricing, usage details, and updates that are easy to understand.
• Simple processes: Quick and easy steps for joining, switching plans, or getting help when something goes wrong.

For energy companies, these priorities are a push to look closely at the real-world moments where customers get stuck and fix them. In practice, that means having the technology to pinpoint where issues happen and the resources to step in, review the process, and make changes.

To meet rising expectations and stay ahead of BECE requirements, energy providers need a sharper focus on customer experience. The strategies below combine practical changes with the right technology to help make services more accessible and seamless.

1. Nail the basics
2. Build transparent, trusted experiences
3. Proactively engage customers
4. Get omnichannel right
5. Personalise with precision
6. Empower your people

Providing valuable service for customers doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s often nailing the basics that yields the best results.

Momentum Energy harnessed Agentforce to handle their service team’s top three enquiries. These high volume, high effort calls not only tied up their service centre, but they also resulted in increased waiting times for customers.

By using Agentforce to summarise these three enquiries, backed by relevant data and even prefilled responses, it lifted the load from the service team, allowing them to focus on other priorities, while streamlining and simplifying things for customers.

For energy providers, now is the time to upgrade your experience, for the sake of your customers and your bottom line. Try Service Cloud free for 30 days to see how giving agents a complete customer view can transform service, and add Marketing Cloud to improve your entire customer journey with automated onboarding and ongoing updates.

Customers stay loyal to your brand when they understand exactly what they are paying for, how their service works, and what is happening behind the scenes. This all starts with plain-English communication, backed by platforms that protect their data and keep every interaction secure.

Secure AI can help make your service more consistent while remaining trustworthy. Tools like Agentforce give your customer support and sales agents instant access to accurate information; they can also suggest next steps and offer real-time insights. This means your people will be able to give clear and accurate information directly to the customer. It also means sensitive information is handled securely, with the right safeguards in place to meet compliance standards.

With Shield 2.0 and the Einstein Trust Layer, you can combine the benefits of AI with built-in security, ensuring customers get the transparency they expect and the privacy they deserve.

Customers find it impressive when energy companies are able to anticipate their needs and act before an issue arises, whether that is sending outage alerts ahead of time, flagging a better plan based on usage trends, or sharing personalised tips to reduce their bills.

This kind of proactive service shows you care about your customers, which builds trust and keeps them engaged.

National Grid, the UK’s electricity system operator, was facing a surge in demand as connection requests from renewable suppliers quadrupled in just three years. The process to join the grid was slow, complex, and filled with technical hurdles, making it hard for smaller providers to get started.

To overcome this challenge, National Grid built its own ConnectNow portal using Sales Cloud. ConnectNow provided a single hub where suppliers could see real-time updates, track milestones, and understand exactly what was needed next. The results were immediate, with satisfaction scores jumping from 7.6 to 8.35.

Omnichannel means giving customers a connected experience across every way they interact with you (channel). This could be through your app, a chatbot, phone support, email, or in person.

It involves connecting your sales, marketing, billing, service and technical support so all are part of the same conversation and customers never have to repeat themselves. It also allows you to provide more personalised service, which makes your customers feel understood and valued.

When done well, an omnichannel strategy makes life easier for both your customers, contractors and internal teams. Practically, this means your people will be able to see the full history of a customer’s interactions, pick up where the last conversation left off, and respond in the customer’s preferred channel.

Tools like Agentforce make this possible by giving your team 360-degree visibility of each customer. No matter who they speak to, or on what channel, the context is always there.

Personalisation in customer experience means shaping interactions, content, and services to match each customer’s needs, preferences, and behaviour. For an energy company, personalisation could mean offering a customer who uses most of their power at night a plan with cheaper off-peak rates.

In our Ninth Edition State of Marketing report , we found that 87% of marketers now use personalisation to keep customers engaged and loyal.

Z Energy, which supplies fuel to nearly half of New Zealand’s market, decided to move all its customer data onto one platform to create one single, accurate view. This allowed them to send targeted offers and communications based on app activity, purchase history, and visit frequency.

Onboarding for business customers in the Z Business Plus program was also simplified, which reduced the average card activation time from 12 days to nine, while re-engagement campaigns for lost customers achieved a very successful 70% win-back rate.

Frontline staff can only deliver great customer experiences if they have the right software and training. Without those tools, even simple issues can take a long time to resolve, leaving both customers and employees frustrated.

For example, a customer service representative at an energy provider might see in Service Cloud that a customer’s recent high bill is due to a faulty meter reading. With all usage history, past service notes, and outage data in one place, they can quickly see the issue, arrange a meter check, and issue a corrected bill, all in a single call.

Energy providers in Australia have to contend with some customer experience (CX) challenges that are unique to our market and the way Australian customer expectations are changing.

Here are some of these challenges and how you can overcome them.

• Balancing speed with human warmth: Customers want fast service, but still expect empathy and a personal touch for complex issues like billing disputes or hardship support.
• Adapting to DER and smart homes: More customers are using solar, batteries, and electric vehicles, so providers need to make these services work smoothly and make the switch simple.
• Meeting privacy and AI expectations: Consumers want personalised service but are increasingly cautious about how their data is used, expecting transparency and control.
• Reducing churn in an open market: Switching energy providers is now so easy that it can be done with a few clicks online. That’s why building long-term trust through consistent, proactive engagement is more important than ever for keeping customers.

Salesforce can help you address these challenges by connecting your data across every customer touchpoint, giving your team a complete view to personalise service, all while maintaining security and transparency.

Tools like Service Cloud and Agentforce keep digital interactions fast and informed, while Marketing Cloud enables timely, relevant outreach. The built-in Shield 2.0 and the Einstein Trust Layer also ensure that your customers' data is handled securely, allowing you to meet high expectations without compromising trust.

Improving the customer experience is an exciting opportunity, and breaking it into simple, practical steps makes it easy to manage and measure. Start by mapping your customer journey and identifying where people get stuck or drop off.

From there, you’ll be able to:

1. Prioritise quick wins that align with BECE themes, like clearer billing or proactive outage alerts.
2. Bring your data together on one platform so every team works from the same complete customer view.
3. Focus on one journey first. For example, you might want to start building a new digital customer onboarding experience to roll out.

Taking it step-by-step will help you build momentum, prove the value of each change, and create a smoother experience that your customers will notice and appreciate.

Customers in Australia now expect engaging with their energy providers to be as simple, secure, and personalised.

Of course, the reliability of your services still matters, but with BECE reforms underway and switching providers being easier than ever, your real differentiator is the customer experience you provide.

To deliver the kind of customer experience that keeps people loyal, you need the right tools. Salesforce brings your data, teams, and channels together so you can work smarter, move faster, and give customers the simple, secure, and personalised service they expect.

Start your free trial with our Pro Suite today to explore all the tools mentioned in this article.