Most utility and telecom providers are not falling short because they lack discipline. They are disciplined. They know how to deliver reliability, manage risk, deploy capital, and operate within complex regulatory environments. Those capabilities remain essential.
But they are no longer enough.
What has changed is the standard customers bring to every interaction. People no longer compare their utility or telecom provider only with other regulated operators. They compare it to the best experience they have had anywhere: the bank that resolved an issue in minutes, the retailer that made a complex transaction feel effortless, the digital platform that anticipated what they needed before they asked.
Reliability is still essential, but no longer a differentiator. Customer expectations have risen, with ACSI scores showing declining satisfaction in utilities (74/100 in 2025) and weak telecom performance in areas like repair timeliness and service ease, raising the bar for regulated operators.
This creates a new leadership challenge: can regulated enterprises orient decisions, priorities, and investments around the customer rather than the internal logic of the organization?
In practice, that often begins when leaders recognize that foundational friction must be addressed before broader transformation efforts can succeed.
This isn’t a new question for Dave Sprosty. As COO and SVP of Customer Centricity at Best Buy, he learned the lesson clearly: this work is not about adding a customer lens. It only matters when it changes how the business operates, shaping priorities, accountability, and action at the core.
The leaders who will stand out in the next era of utilities and telecom will act on three imperatives. AI does not replace them. It accelerates them.
1. Make customer centricity an operating principle, not a side initiative
Customer centricity is still too often treated as a side effort. It is assigned to the contact center, digital, marketing, or a transformation office. That is usually where momentum begins to fade, because customers do not experience the organization as separate functions. They experience one journey.
That is why customer centricity must become an operating principle, not a side initiative running alongside the business.
Customer centricity becomes real when every function understands how its decisions affect the end-to-end customer journey. It becomes real when customer outcomes are reviewed alongside financial and operational outcomes, when investment decisions are tied to removing friction, and when leaders ask not only whether the organization executed efficiently but also whether the experience was clear, fair, and easy for customers to navigate.
This is not a softer lens on the business. It is a more strategic lens.
In utilities and telecom, most frustration does not come from one dramatic breakdown. It builds through accumulated friction: a confusing bill, an outage update that is technically accurate but not helpful, a service issue that gets handed off too many times, a repetitive authentication process, a policy explanation that makes sense internally but not to the person receiving it. None of those issues may seem defining on their own. Together, they define the relationship customers have with the company.
In some cases, the impact goes beyond reputation. In June 2025, the New York PSC alone reported $28.9 million in penalties or revenue adjustments tied to poor customer service. It is one signal of a broader shift toward performance-based regulation, where customer outcomes can directly affect financial results.
When customer centricity takes hold, the leadership conversation shifts. The enterprise stops asking only, “How efficiently did we execute?” and begins asking, “What did this feel like from the customer’s perspective, and what does that mean for how we operate?” That shift changes priorities, sequencing, governance, and accountability.
Without visible executive ownership, customer centricity remains just talk. With it, it becomes part of how the business runs. That was one of the clearest lessons from Best Buy and the EnergyCo transformation: progress accelerated only when leadership prioritized customer centricity.
2. Modernize listening: let AI surface the signal, and let employees turn it into change
Most organizations no longer struggle to gather customer feedback. What they struggle with is interpreting it quickly, across channels, and with sufficient operational context to act on it.
In regulated industries, the signals are everywhere: recorded calls, chat transcripts, billing disputes, outage complaints, field notes, digital journeys, complaint logs, service interactions spread across multiple systems, and frontline employee observations on where customers consistently get stuck. The challenge is no longer accessing feedback. The challenge is turning the large volume of signals into clear insights.
This is where AI changes the game.
AI can now analyze interactions across the enterprise and surface recurring pain points, emotional intensity, language patterns, friction frequency, and escalation triggers much faster than traditional survey cycles or manual review. It can show which issues recur most often, where frustration is concentrated, and which moments are most strongly associated with confusion, distrust, or escalation.
Many organizations still have blind spots in key customer channels. J.D. Power’s 2025 utility digital experience study found that 32% of utility websites and apps fail to meet basic navigation and design standards, and only 16% offer meaningful, proactive tools forcing customers to do too much work to get what they need.
But AI does not replace Voice of the Customer through the Employee (or VoCE). It modernizes it by making customer signal easier to detect at scale while making employee insight more actionable.
AI can detect the signal. It cannot fully explain the operational reality behind it. It cannot tell leaders why a billing issue keeps resurfacing across channels, where policy contradictions create unnecessary contacts, or how a handoff actually breaks down for both the customer and the employee trying to resolve it. That is why frontline teams remain indispensable.
That was true at EnergyCo. Early frontline input did more than confirm that satisfaction was low. It revealed why the organization could not simply layer new initiatives on top of the current state. Employees were absorbing the consequences of broken experiences every day. They knew where the friction lay, how customers were reacting, and why basic issues had to be addressed before anything new could meaningfully stick.
That is the modern listening model: AI continuously surfaces the signal, employees interpret it with human and operational context, and the organization gains a clearer, more actionable view of where friction matters most.
This also changes the employee experience. In many regulated organizations, frontline teams have spent years serving as shock absorbers for broken processes. They apologize for confusion they did not create, work around failures they cannot fix, and carry the emotional weight of customer frustration without sufficient authority or visibility to address the underlying system. When AI gives the enterprise a clearer view of recurring friction and employees are invited to diagnose and redesign it, frontline insight stops being anecdotal and becomes operationally actionable.
That is when listening becomes more than a reporting exercise. It becomes a mechanism for coordinated change.
3. Govern the experience through journey discipline and activation
Many organizations still treat journey mapping as a workshop output. It gets used for alignment or presentation, then filed away while the organization returns to its regular routines. That is one of the main reasons customer centricity efforts stall.
Customer journey mapping only creates enterprise value when it becomes a discipline.
Journey discipline gives the organization a structured way to define lifecycle stages, surface moments that matter, identify where friction concentrates, and connect those pain points to the people, processes, policies, and technologies behind them. More importantly, it creates shared visibility and a basis for prioritization. Leaders can move beyond debating which issues are loudest internally and focus on the frictions that matter most to customers and enterprise performance.
That has practical implications across the business. It shapes digital sequencing, contact-center design, billing simplification, outage communications, service handoffs, field coordination, and how cross-functional teams work together. It turns insight into a roadmap rather than just a diagnosis. At EnergyCo, that discipline helped turn customer pain points into concrete actions across billing, digital self-service, IVR and call-center experience, and outage communications. Journey discipline helped clarify where to start, who needed to own the work, and how progress would be measured over time.
This matters in telecom as well. ACSI’s 2025 study shows weak scores in repair timeliness, technician experience, and service ease; signals of broader journey breakdowns that require coordinated fixes across functions and channels.
Journey mapping is also where employee participation becomes especially powerful. Frontline and operational teams do more than confirm the data. They expose where the journey fails in the real world and what it takes to remove friction. They reveal trade-offs, dependencies, and failure points that dashboards alone cannot show.
Journey discipline reduces unnecessary debate by replacing opinion with evidence and isolated efforts with coordinated action. Complexity will always exist in regulated industries. The point is not to eliminate complexity. It is to prevent it from becoming an excuse for drift.
And that is where activation matters. Customer centricity does not advance because an organization heard the signal. It advances when insight becomes a roadmap with ownership, cross-functional action, measurement, and visible progress.
Where AI changes the game
AI is not a fourth imperative. It is the accelerant that amplifies the first three.
First, AI accelerates insight. Instead of waiting for quarterly surveys or manually compiled reports, organizations can continuously analyze calls, chats, digital behavior, complaints, and service interactions. Pain points surface earlier. Patterns become visible sooner. Leaders can confirm emerging problems before they turn into mistrust.
Second, AI makes journey discipline more dynamic. Journey maps no longer need to remain static snapshots. They can evolve into living management tools informed by real interaction data and refreshed as new friction patterns emerge.
Third, AI can improve frontline execution directly. Agents and service teams can receive better guidance, faster access to policy clarifications, more relevant context, and stronger support during emotionally charged moments. That does not diminish the human role. It increases the value of human judgment by reducing the energy employees spend navigating disconnected systems and working around preventable failures.
That distinction matters. This is not about automation for its own sake. It is about helping organizations listen more effectively, align faster, and act with greater precision.
The case extends beyond regulated sectors. Qualtrics (2025) found trusted brands drive 1.7x more purchases, showing experience is a growth lever, not polish. Regulated industries are now reaching that same inflection point.
The leadership inflection point
Customer centricity in utilities and telecom used to be framed as a long cultural journey, with operational benefits expected to materialize eventually. That framing no longer fits the moment.
The fundamentals remain the same: make customer centricity an operating principle, modernize listening with AI and frontline insights, and manage the experience through journey discipline and activation. What AI changes is the speed at which friction is heard, understood, and acted on.
That presents a real strategic choice for leaders.
They can use AI to reinforce existing silos, accelerate broken processes, and automate legacy friction. Or they can use it to strengthen judgment, empower employees, reduce service burden, and build a more customer-centric operating model.