The Utility Manager is now a regulated and recognized professional figure – with skills certified by the UNI 11782 – and is no longer just a simple seller of energy, gas and telecommunications contracts. Thanks to the commitment of the members of the Italian Utility Manager Association - Assium, in fact, in 2020 the figure of the Utility Manager as a certified role and recognized following a training course and exams.
Unfortunately, in Italy, the sector has always enjoyed a very low reputation, due to the fact that too often contracts were offered to customers that were not suited to real needs and after-sales assistance was practically non-existent or at least inefficient.
La standardization was therefore born as an inevitable and urgent consequence of a profound transformation: rethinking the entire model by placing thecustomer interest (family or entrepreneur) and its need for transparency in after-sales assistance.
David Bussini, General Manager of FBC Italia, co-founder and General Manager of UMA Utility Manager Academy, member of the board of Assium and coordinator of the UNI 11782 Table, is convinced of this: an agency that deals with the management of electricity, gas or telephone and connectivity utilities, today can no longer limit itself to providing the mere service contract management relating to commodities. It must renew itself in terms of skills, contain trained figures within it, capable of analyzing data - economic and not only - relating to the geopolitical situation, and to make forecast expenditure developments for its customers.
“The future of the market is the service in which there is the management of the various commodities and therefore of the specific contracts – says Bussini -. For decades, operators and agencies have lived on the spasmodic search for new pure commodity contracts, with the logic of acquisition over retention, leading the sector to collapse. Today the market completely rejects this business model and all agencies need to align to this new need".
What are the services that an agency that deals with utilities must offer?
According to Bussini, the services that an agency must offer to customers, both in the field of telecommunications supplies and in that of energy supplies, are: "data analysis, benchmarking reports, operational and commercial assistance, such as ticketing, the verification of the correct billing and above all the development of expenditure forecasts, the budgeting”.
The undeniable value added to make use of the consultancy of a qualified Utility Manager is certainly to stand out from the red ocean in which most of the non-certified realities are found. Current agency strategies fail to build solid portfolios because the professionals who work on behalf of these agencies or even individually have no a precise identity and the skills are acquired directly in the field at the expense of their customers.
In short, for Bussini, it is essential that today a Utility Manager is certified and "educated"a convey security to the final consumer. "Certification as a protection tool - he adds - is one of the main arguments that allowed the writing of the UNI 11782 standard of 2020 and is, together with the training path, a first step towards the general improvement of the sector, the first watershed to the past".
