AGENDA

The bill is the most frequent, most emotional, and most overlooked moment a service provider has with its customers. It arrives twelve times a year, it’s never optional. Paying it is what, literally, keeps the lights on, the water flowing, and the furnace burning – for both parties. But most service providers still treat bill delivery and bill payment as a back-office operation - a transaction to be completed rather than a relationship to be sustained.

The gap between what customers want and expect, and what service providers are prepared to deliver is the subject of this keynote.

Service providers – are now held to a standard set somewhere else. The customer who pays a water bill, an insurance premium, or a doctor bill also pays for streaming, ride-hailing, and same-day delivery. Those retail and e-commerce experiences are the baseline against which service providers are being measured and judged by customers. In sectors like utilities, regulators are watching too – monitoring day sales outstanding, accounts in arrears and service disconnections and ensuring affordability options are being served. Oversight and corporate boards are evaluating satisfaction and net promoter scores that move slowly and cost a lot to lift. And AI agents are beginning to mediate consumer relationships, which can further separate service providers from customers if not approached with intention, integration and intelligence.

NiSource serves nearly four million natural gas and electric customers across six states through Columbia Gas and NIPSCO, making customer experience transformation a high scale, high complexity mandate. This session will explore how NiSource is building more connected customer journeys across service, communications, outage, affordability, and digital engagement. The discussion will look at the transformation journey behind this shift: what it takes to move from fragmented touchpoints to a more unified customer experience, how teams prioritize the journeys that matter most, and what lessons have shaped the program along the way.

The session will also highlight how customer satisfaction has become a strategic measure of progress. NIPSCO received the number one ranking in electric utility business customer satisfaction among mid sized utilities in the Midwest in the J.D. Power 2024 study, with its satisfaction score climbing 51 points from the prior year. 

Beyond improving customer interactions, NiSource’s transformation is centered on modernizing the digital foundation of the utility enterprise. Through a multi-year modernization of core Customer Information Systems (CIS) and digital engagement platforms, NiSource is creating a connected operating model that supports customers, contact center teams, field operations, and enterprise users through a unified experience layer. By reducing fragmentation across systems and channels, the program is enabling faster service resolution, improved employee efficiency, stronger customer insights, and more seamless engagement across the customer lifecycle.

The next phase of transformation extends beyond digitization toward an intelligent utility enterprise powered by Vertical AI and connected platform capabilities. NiSource is evolving from transactional service delivery to predictive and proactive engagement—bringing together customer data, operational workflows, service interactions, and analytics to support decision-making across customer care, operations, and enterprise functions. This approach helps create a scalable foundation that improves customer satisfaction while increasing agility, operational resilience, and long-term business value.