PowerGen has announced plans to provide mobile telecoms to its customers.
PowerGen has announced its plans to provide a mobile telecoms service in deals with Vodafone and BT Cellnet. The deal, through its TCS joint-venture with Affinity Internet Holdings, plans to enter the market at the end of the year. This appears to be the logical next step for the utility, which already provides an electricity, gas and fixed line telephony service.
This multi-product offering, in one guise or another, appears to be the strategy that most major players in the UK energy market are developing to increase their customer expenditure. ScottishPower and the Royal bank of Scotland are planning a joint venture for energy and financial services (although this has been delayed) and Centrica has made no secret of its move into the financial services sector to take the high street banks head-on.
Although most strategies are designed to increase spend per customer and introduce economies in serving them, PowerGen’s move is particularly interesting as it specifically identifies the opportunities of convergent billing and also introduces mCommerce into the field of energy supply and service. If PowerGen gets it right by offering good technology and services that customers really want, the venture should be successful. This may well lead to the first interactive multi-product platform for dealing with customers and will undoubtedly be something the rest of the industry will study in some detail.
