Digital investment in utilities, energy and telecoms has never been higher. BCG estimates energy companies alone have spent between $500 million and $1 billion on technology programmes over the past five years. Water companies are modernising customer platforms. Telecoms providers are racing to deploy self-serve at scale as Ofcom tightens consumer protection requirements. Network operators are under pressure to reduce cost-to-serve while improving the customer experience across millions of touchpoints.
And yet, as BCG puts it plainly: the return from this once-in-a-lifetime investment is patchy at best.
If you're a digital leader in this sector, that will probably ring true. The platform is live. The business case was approved. But the gap between what Optimizely can deliver and what it's actually delivering in day-to-day operations might be wider than it should be.
The good news is that gap is almost never a platform problem. Here's where we consistently see the value leak - and what the organisations closing it are doing differently.
There's a meaningful difference between having Optimizely live and actually using it to deliver the personalised, responsive, low-friction digital experiences your customers now expect - and your regulator increasingly demands.
Customer satisfaction in the UK utilities sector reached 73.1 in January 2026 - an improvement, but still well below the standard customers carry from their interactions with retail, banking, and other digitally mature sectors. The bar is set by their last great experience elsewhere - not by what's typical in your industry.
For utilities and telecoms, the pressure is structural. Ofcom now requires telecoms providers to offer clearer contract information, transparent pricing, and better support for vulnerable customers. In energy, Ofgem's customer service expectations are tightening alongside scrutiny of digital channel performance. Meeting these requirements isn't just a compliance exercise - it's a digital experience challenge.
Most Optimizely implementations in this sector were stood up to replace legacy CMS platforms or consolidate multiple websites. They succeeded at that. But personalisation, experimentation, and self-serve optimisation - the capabilities that drive real cost-to-serve reduction and customer satisfaction improvement - typically remain untouched.
What to do: Conduct a platform usage audit against your full Optimizely licence. Map which modules are active and which are dormant, and build a prioritised activation plan focused on the customer journeys with the highest volume and the highest failure rate.
Across utilities, energy and telecoms, digital self-serve is the primary mechanism for reducing cost-to-serve at scale. Every customer who successfully manages their account, reports an outage, updates their details, or resolves a billing query online is a contact centre interaction avoided. In organisations serving millions of customers, even marginal improvements in self-serve completion rates translate into significant operational savings.
European utilities that have properly activated their digital customer experience programmes have achieved up to seven times growth in customer self-serve and returns of up to nine times on their digital investment. The gap between those results and average performance is almost entirely explained by how the programme around the platform is run - not by the platform itself.
Optimizely's experimentation capability is purpose-built to find and fix the points where customers abandon self-serve journeys. A/B testing on account management flows. Personalised outage communications based on location and account type. Proactive notifications that head off contact centre calls before they happen. These aren't theoretical features - they're live capabilities in your licence that most organisations in this sector haven't activated.
Mando Group's work with United Utilities - helping drive 70% of their traffic to self-serve tools - is a direct example of what's achievable when the platform is properly configured around this goal. The technology was already there. The difference was in how it was deployed and continuously optimised.
What to do: Identify your top five highest-volume self-serve journeys and run a conversion audit on each. Even a 5% improvement in completion rates across billing, outage reporting, and account management at scale produces significant cost savings - and that data becomes your internal investment case for doing more.
Utilities, energy and telecoms organisations communicate with an extraordinarily broad range of audiences - residential customers, business customers, landlords, developers, local authorities, regulators, investors, media. Each has different needs, different vocabulary, and different reasons for engaging with your digital presence.
Most Optimizely implementations in this sector are set up to publish content efficiently to a single, undifferentiated audience. The personalisation layer - which would allow you to serve different content, messaging, and journey paths to different audience segments - is rarely activated. The result is a platform doing a fraction of the segmentation and targeting work it's capable of.
Utilities that are using digital tools to move beyond one-size-fits-all communications - deploying hyper-personalisation based on specific customer habits and usage patterns - are pulling ahead of competitors on both customer satisfaction and loyalty. The shift from generic outbound communications to personalised, relevant digital interactions is where the biggest customer experience gains in this sector are being made.
For telecoms specifically, with Ofcom's renewed focus on out-of-contract customers and vulnerable consumer support, the ability to personalise communications at scale - targeting the right message to the right customer at the right moment - is both a commercial opportunity and a regulatory expectation.
What to do: Start with your business customer segment. Business customers typically represent disproportionate revenue relative to volume, and the personalisation use case is clearest - sector-specific content, account management tailored by contract type, and proactive communications around renewals and upgrades. This is a contained, high-value pilot for your broader personalisation programme.
Digital leaders in regulated industries face a particularly demanding ROI conversation. Your board and executive team are focused on Ofgem or Ofcom compliance, operational efficiency ratios, and customer satisfaction scores. Finance wants to see cost-to-serve reduction, contact centre deflection rates, and digital channel adoption. Marketing needs to demonstrate that digital communications are driving the right behaviours.
Most digital reporting in this sector is built around platform metrics - sessions, page views, digital adoption rates - that don't connect clearly to any of those outcomes. The result is a reporting gap that makes it difficult to defend existing investment, let alone make the case for doing more.
Energy companies that have unlocked the real value of their digital programmes share one characteristic: they defined specific, measurable KPIs upfront - and built their measurement frameworks around those outcomes, not around platform activity. Cost-to-serve reduction. Contact centre deflection. Self-serve completion. Regulatory compliance evidence. These are the metrics that resonate with leadership - and Optimizely's analytics and experimentation capability is built to surface them, if the implementation is set up with that goal in mind.
What to do: Reframe your digital reporting around three or four outcomes that your board and regulator care about. For most utilities and telecoms organisations, that means self-serve adoption, cost-per-interaction trends, and customer satisfaction scores - not website traffic. Then ensure your Optimizely analytics setup is configured to surface those figures, not just engagement data.
The organisations getting the most from Optimizely in utilities, energy and telecoms have one thing in common: they didn't treat go-live as the finish line. They treated it as the starting point for a continuous optimisation programme - with a rolling roadmap, regular experimentation cycles, and a clear process for turning customer data and behaviour into platform improvements.
Most don't work that way. Implementation partners deliver the platform and move on. Internal teams manage day-to-day publishing but don't have the capacity or mandate to run ongoing optimisation. The roadmap stalls. And gradually, the gap between what the platform was supposed to deliver and what it's actually delivering widens.
This matters acutely in a sector where customer expectations are rising, regulatory requirements are tightening, and the competitive pressure - particularly in energy retail and telecoms - is intensifying. A digital platform that was fit for purpose at launch in 2022 may be significantly behind the curve by 2026.
Real-time outage updates, personalised energy usage insights, proactive billing communications - these are the experiences customers now expect as standard. Delivering them requires a programme of continuous improvement, not a static platform.
What to do: Establish a quarterly digital performance review that evaluates your Optimizely programme against both customer outcomes and operational targets. If your current partner isn't bringing a proactive optimisation agenda to those conversations - new ideas, test results, feature activations - that's a signal worth acting on.
The utilities, energy and telecoms organisations closing the gap between digital investment and digital return share a common approach. They've connected their platform to operational outcomes - self-serve rates, cost-to-serve, regulatory compliance. They've activated personalisation and experimentation beyond the basics. And they work with a partner who challenges their thinking and holds the programme accountable to measurable improvement.
Mando Group's work with organisations like United Utilities and SSEN demonstrates what a properly activated Optimizely programme looks like in this sector. The technology is rarely the limiting factor. The strategy, operating model, and partner around it almost always are.
Want to know where your Optimizely programme stands? Our free 5-minute benchmark assessment gives you a personalised view of where you're getting value - and where you're not. Built for digital leaders in utilities, energy and telecoms.