Energy retailers’ profitability depends on the decisions pricing teams make every day. In this highly pressurized environment, teams must strike a fine balance between creating attractive tariffs for customers, maintaining margins, and ensuring regulatory compliance. They must process multiple data streams and manage huge amounts of data to deliver accurate energy forecasting that keeps their organization ahead of competitors.

And all too often, they’re managing this complexity with old technologies, manual processes, and spreadsheets. Self-built and legacy systems buckle under growing volumes of data, and teams can’t process information fast enough to react to dynamic market conditions.

The pressure to create accurate, competitive pricing combined with inefficient tools and clunky processes can lead to frustration, burnout, and in the worst-case scenario, high employee turnover.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this blog, we’ll explore how energy data management using older systems impacts employee morale, staff turnover, and, ultimately, the bottom line. Then we’ll look at how a different approach to knowledge sharing, driven by updated IT infrastructure, can give your team a competitive edge and transform the way it operates.

The True Cost of Pricing Team Turnover

With a patchwork of outdated and self-built tech combined with manual processes, many teams rely on a few long-standing employees to act as the Knowledge Base. These employees understand how processes and workarounds operate and how different systems work together.

When they leave the organization, that repository of knowledge leaves with them.

Concerned by an aging workforce, the energy sector has worked hard to attract younger employees. And it’s worked. In the US, millennials are now the largest demographic in the industry, but this also means that 56% of workers have less than 10 years of service. As a result, when more established team members leave, there can be some hidden costs for the organization, including:

1. Loss of Institutional and Technical Knowledge

When a team relies on a patchwork approach, there may only be one or two employees who know how the entire operation works. Just a single individual going on vacation can disrupt the team and cause a drop in productivity that ripples out through the organization, even impacting customer loyalty and trust. And if that person leaves the organization altogether, the retailer can move from market leader to playing catch up almost overnight. 

It’s not only technical knowledge that leaves with experts. Team members build relationships with customers and understand their preferences. Combined with a wealth of market knowledge, they can spot opportunities that benefit both customers and the retailer. When employee turnover is high, this knowledge is soon lost. 

2. Training and Onboarding Costs

While years of accumulated knowledge are lost when long-standing team members leave, replacing more recent hires is also costly, ranging from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. It’s not simply the HR costs involved; teams and organizations can expect a drop in productivity as a new hire gets up to speed, and existing team members have an even bigger workload as they train the recruit. 

Older technology is also an issue for younger workers. Seventy percent of Gen Z employees say they would leave their jobs for the promise of better technology elsewhere.

3.  Higher Risk of Pricing Errors and Inconsistencies

As new team members get used to new systems and processes, errors are more likely. It’s harder for them to recognize mistakes than for long-standing team members, who are more familiar with the data they handle and can spot if numbers look off. 

Accurate energy forecasting is fundamental to creating competitive tariffs that deliver the margins retailers need to stay in profit. But forecasts don’t just have to be accurate; they also need to be fast. As new team members get up to speed, pricing teams risk being left behind as the market shifts and may be liable for imbalance charges.

Even small inaccuracies can lead to incorrect bills, disgruntled customers, and impact retailers’ profit margins.

Hidden Knowledge Management Challenges in Pricing Teams

Transferring and exchanging knowledge is vital in all businesses, both for organizations and individuals. When expertise is pooled and shared, employees don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.

It also gives people agency. Engaged employees in a collaborative culture and with a sense of purpose and empowerment are 87% less likely to leave.

In one sense, the energy sector is a step ahead – helping to achieve Net Zero is a key motivator for younger employees joining the industry. However, older systems and technologies make collaboration and autonomy challenging. When knowledge exists in people instead of centralized systems, there are additional challenges and frustrations for team members, including:

1. The team relies on undocumented decision-making frameworks and spreadsheet-based pricing processes.

These are difficult and time-consuming to explain to new starters and can be lost to the organization when team members leave.

2.  Legacy systems that need specialist knowledge or even rely on shadow IT.

Instead of easy-to-use systems with a User Interface (UI) that makes sense to digital-first employees, the team relies on complex and unintuitive processes. And when employees resort to unauthorized shadow IT to get the job done, the entire organization is put at risk. IBM’s annual cost of a data breach survey found shadow IT was responsible for 1 in 3 breaches. Identity and access management company, Okta suffered a series of damaging breaches, all stemming from an employee accessing a private Google account from a corporate device. 

3. Inefficiencies Instead of Automation.

Pricing teams waste time on labor-intensive tasks instead of expanding their knowledge through innovation and prioritizing strategy. They also get bogged down with inefficient processes rather than focusing on value-driven tasks and projects. 

4. Information is scattered across multiple systems

Data that’s hard to access hampers energy data management and decision-making. Pricing teams can’t move quickly enough to keep up with market dynamics, and accurate energy forecasting becomes more difficult. It’s hard for pricing teams to offer competitive products and maintain a profitable customer portfolio.

Knowledge Management Impacts Business Outcomes

Knowledge Management challenges don’t only affect your pricing team’s morale and efficiency. They impact your customers and the service they receive. It’s hard for teams to respond quickly and deliver competitive pricing and tariffs or to offer the more complex, bespoke tariffs that Industrial and Commercial (I&C) customers now want.

If employees are busy navigating complex processes, they don’t have time to innovate and stay ahead of competitors. Organizations that struggle to keep up lose their market position and underperform financially.

The result? Pricing teams’ Knowledge Management challenges affect the bottom line. At a time when retailers’ margins are under pressure, pricing teams struggle to improve efficiency. Inaccurate pricing eats into profits, and retailers are locked into contracts that don’t generate sufficient returns.

Building a More Resilient Pricing Function

If pricing teams are central to energy retailers’ profitability, how can they become more efficient and effective? How can they deliver the fast, accurate energy pricing that maintains market position?

There are three foundations for effective Knowledge Management:

- Documented, repeatable processes that can be easily accessed and shared.

- An accessible Knowledge Base so pricing knowledge is centralized in systems.

- Expertise distributed across the team, not siloed in one or two individuals.

With these foundations, knowledge stays in the company when team members leave. New joiners can be onboarded quickly and soon feel empowered as contributing team members. Expertise, experience, and new learnings are pooled to build a collaborative, more productive team.

Pricing teams can feel they’re part of a thriving retailer in an industry that, through accurate energy forecasting, is helping to accelerate the energy transition.

How Gorilla addresses these challenges

With an accelerating energy transition, the sector is rapidly shifting to dynamic pricing, time-of-use tariffs, and more tailored tariff options. Today’s retailers have no choice but to become data-driven organizations, navigating energy market volatility with data solutions that keep them ahead of the competition.

Gorilla’s cloud-based platform centralizes data streams. With an intuitive UI, new team members can quickly get up and running—no more frustration and wasted time as employees switch between different systems and processes.

Out-of-the-box integrations and a robust, easy to use API offer scalability. When needed, you can rapidly add new data sources, increasing your team’s accuracy and your business’s competitive edge.

Centralized data and effective integrations bring your team closer to real-time processing, and automation becomes a reality, creating replicable audit trails. Employees are freed from mundane and error-prone manual processes and can focus on more engaging innovation and strategic work.

Gorilla has a track record of success across many regions, making it easier for teams to capitalize on this experience and get up to speed. With a standardized pricing process, new team members can quickly understand the processes.

Gorilla’s platform offers a win-win-win. Faster, more accurate energy pricing results in improved customer retention and growth. Market-leading products and operational efficiencies improve margins and profitability. And highly skilled employees feel part of an industry-leading team accelerating the energy transition.

Take the first step in transforming your pricing team.

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