Throughout the customer journey, SlimPay provides an end-to-end payment solution for the energy sector, both to overcome the different challenges and to address customers needs.
As per other sectors, the energy sector is facing big challenges. New entrants are starting to take market shares with a more sustainable offer and with a digital presence. For both traditional players and pure players of the energy sector, the payment is a crucial step of the customer experience and customer retention represents a great challenge.
Many companies of the utilities sector are trusting SlimPay: EDF, GreenYellow, Plüm Energie, OVO Energy or Mint Energie.
1. Customers enrollment for the utilities sector
The competitiveness of the energy market is getting higher and higher. To face this, companies need to optimize the customer experience to avoid any friction during the enrollment process resulting in a cart abandonment.
In order to ensure a smooth enrollment, customers should be able to digitally sign their contract, without having to deal with time-consuming paperworks. Also, at the stage of subscription enrolment, customers might be choosing to pay via Sepa Direct Debit (SDD), which requires an e-mandate signature.
SlimPay is offering a secured and convenient e-signature, allowing customers to simultaneously sign a contract and the SEPA e-mandate.
One common use case for energy providers is the subscription via a call center with the help of an agent. This subscription path has to be improved, allowing customers to simply and quickly subscribe to an energy offer. Taking this into account, SlimPay is allowing energy companies to perform signatures by delegation, with the same level of security.
2. Payment collection
Payments being the lifeblood of any recurring-based activity, the utilities sector has to be careful to avoid revenue losses. To maintain control over revenues, energy companies have to offer the right payment means adapted to their use cases. They can offer subscriptions plans based on card payments or SEPA Direct Debit, or even combine them on the Checkout.
In many cases, some customers are still reluctant to sign a mandate as they want to keep control over their payments, and want to choose the right moment to execute them. That is why the use of checks and TIP (Titre Interbancaire de Paiement) is still very common among the French energy providers. However, these two payment methods are very costly and require a lot of paperwork for energy providers.
One interesting alternative to checks and TIP SlimPay is able to offer, is the on-demand Direct Debit. This means that the customer has to log in to his energy provider space, and give his consent for the payment of the standing invoice.
Also, depending on the offer built by each utilities company, there might be a need to adapt the recurring payments according to the monthly consumption. A pay-as-you-go subscription can be offered either through card or SDD.
3. Activity follow-up
To monitor the activity, energy companies need to be able to have a clear view on their payments and subscribers.
For this purpose, SlimPay is offering the Dashboard, a consolidated interface to follow up signed mandates, payments and card aliases. Users of the Dashboard are also able to perform some operations as:
- exporting reports,
- initiating payment plans,
- updating information,
- managing fund transfers,
- making refunds.
Also, to manage unpaid invoices they need to have a solution enabling them to recover them. SlimPay is allowing merchants to retry failed SDD payments, either manually or with the Automatic Retry feature that can be set up. If a SDD payment keeps being rejected, energy providers can offer their customers to pay for their standing invoices by card. This recovering method allows them to get an immediate authorization and to quickly recover failed payments.
