In B2B energy, great service builds trust and removes friction, allowing customers to focus on their business instead of their supplier.
Building on the insights from earlier articles in this series, this third part looks at how leading suppliers use service as a strategic lever to unlock tangible commercial benefits.
Suppliers that invest in capability, empowerment, and process maturity unlock tangible commercial benefits. These include: increased loyalty, more referrals, and lower operating costs through fewer escalations, rework, and complaint handling.
This article highlights key areas to focus on for lasting impact.
We’ll cover:
- Understanding your customer journey in full
- The importance of process maturity to support great service
- How top-performing B2B suppliers lead and operate their customer teams
Do you really understand your customer journey?
Improving customer service starts with gaining a complete view of your customer’s experience - from onboarding through to billing and every step in between. Without this insight, service improvements risk being reactive or misaligned with what customers truly need.
Journey mapping helps identify where delays happen, expectations aren’t met, or friction causes frustration. When done well, journey mapping simplifies complexity and smooths the path for both customers and your internal teams.
Your people can’t outperform broken processes
Even highly skilled and motivated agents face challenges when processes are inefficient or fragmented. When workflows are unclear or inconsistent, agents spend more time reacting to problems instead of resolving them.
Complex, multi-site B2B accounts often end up in generalist teams without the necessary tools or authority to provide end-to-end solutions. This limits the potential for excellent service.
Mature service processes in B2B should provide:
- Clear ownership and accountability
- Streamlined resolution paths with minimal handoffs
- Robust escalation routes
- Flexibility to handle exceptions
How customer service leaders are winning
Top-performing B2B energy suppliers make deliberate choices in how they lead and structure their service operations. They focus on creating environments where people are equipped to do their best work and where service delivery consistently supports customer and commercial outcomes.
Here are six ways leading suppliers are setting themselves apart:
- Leadership-first culture - invest in leaders who coach and protect agent autonomy.
- Train before empowering - capability first, authority second.
- Make first contact resolution the North Star – prioritise FCR and unlock downstream benefits that are commercially valuable
- Partner with offshore teams, don’t just “outsource” - high investment, high trust, high retention.
- Ring-fence complexity - don’t treat all customers the same. Use specialised pods for multi-site and high-value customers.
- Enable judgment, don’t suppress it, and use scripts as flexible guides
These organisations build service models that reduce effort, build loyalty, and deliver measurable commercial results.
The bottom line
Exceptional service delivers growth, loyalty, and operational efficiency.
Across this series, we’ve explored what it takes to deliver consistently high performance: empowered agents, integrated offshore teams, and service operations built for clarity and control.
When these elements work together, service becomes a strategic advantage.
If you'd like to explore how to turn service excellence into measurable commercial impact, contact Ian Barker or Hannah Sword.
Ian Barker
Managing Partner
Ian shapes the BFY vision and inspires our team to bring it to life, while remaining central to complex client engagements in Strategy, Commercial, and Operations.
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