Sustainable mail efficiency for utilities

With mounting regulatory obligations, internal pressure, and growing customer expectations, utility companies are under increasing pressure to improve operations. Whether it’s to reduce operational costs, streamline communications, or meet sustainability and compliance requirements, all organisations within the utilities supply chain are under scrutiny – from major energy suppliers to regional water providers and network operators.

The challenge

Traditionally, utility providers serve a wide range of customers with a high volume of communications. Documents can include routine billing, triggered payment processes, emergency service notifications, customer onboarding, and regulatory notices.

While most utilities now offer online billing and digital account management, gaps remain:

• Not all customers opt for digital delivery.
• Workflows are often fragmented across disconnected systems.
• Triggered communications may still rely on manual processes.
• Reporting for compliance or ESG purposes can be cumbersome.

With restrictive technology or legacy systems, many utilities experience inefficiencies in workflow management and face recurring pain points:

• Rising operational costs: Print and postage processes consume significant time and budget.
• Inefficient workflows: Disconnected systems or multiple suppliers can create errors, bottlenecks, and rework.
• Limited visibility and control: Operations and procurement teams struggle to track communications, monitor delivery, or produce reliable reports.
• Compliance and audit risk: Fragmented processes make it difficult to meet regulatory obligations, demonstrate ESG initiatives, or provide full audit trails.
• Customer dissatisfaction: Delayed, duplicate, or returned communications, or documents sent with incomplete addresses, lead to complaints, disputes, and increased customer service effort.

These pain points are common across energy suppliers, water companies, network operators, and public-sector utilities, particularly when balancing regulatory pressure, operational constraints, and customer expectations.

The solution

Specialist multichannel communications platforms, like Aceni, help utilities address these challenges by:

• Automating communications workflows, reducing manual effort and operational costs.
• Optimising channel choice, lowering print and postage spend while offering customers secure digital options, including accessible formats for visually impaired or differently-abled users.
• Centralising reporting and governance, simplifying compliance, audits, and ESG reporting.
• Improving accuracy and delivery reliability, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing disputes.
• Delivering carbon-neutral documents from day one.

Even in organisations with online billing in place, Aceni fills critical gaps. It consolidates paper, email, SMS, and portal communications into a single workflow, tracks triggered messages, and provides audit-ready reporting, all while supporting accessibility standards.

By modernising communications, utilities can transform a high-volume, high-cost process into a secure, efficient, and sustainable operation, providing real value for procurement teams, operations managers, and their customers alike.

The results

After adoption, utility suppliers using Aceni can expect to achieve:

• Digital transformation in weeks: Automation, better control, and tracked documents.
• Cost reduction: Postage and print savings, offset by reduced labour and errors.
• Efficiency gains: Staff redeployed from manual mailing tasks to higher-value operational work.
• Improved compliance: Centralised reporting and audit trails support regulatory, procurement, and ESG requirements.
• Enhanced customer experience: Accurate, timely communication, including accessible digital formats, reduces complaints and increases satisfaction.

Why it matters for utilities

Aceni provides a solution that:

• Consolidates communications workflows, reducing operational risk.
• Supports digital transformation for agile and challenger utilities.
• Meets the needs of framework- or tender-driven utilities with full auditability, secure delivery, and accessibility compliance.

By modernising communications, utilities can turn a high-volume, high-cost process into a streamlined, compliant, cost-effective, and accessible operation. This translates into tangible value for procurement teams, operations managers, and customers alike.