Becoming a Love Brand in an Industry Nobody Loves

Most people don't expect to love their energy supplier.

They expect complicated bills, frustrating service experiences, long waiting times and communication that only makes sense after reading it three times. Energy is one of many industries where customers have learned to lower their expectations.

Yet some companies manage to create genuine emotional loyalty in exactly these environments.

This talk explores a simple but powerful question: How do you build customer love in an industry that nobody loves?

Rather than focusing on branding, marketing campaigns or customer satisfaction scores, the session examines the role of UX, service design and radically smooth background operations in creating experiences that customers genuinely remember and talk about.

A series of real customer stories shows how trust is built in moments that are often overlooked: a billing issue, a support interaction, an unexpected crisis, or a process that simply works when customers need it most. These stories reveal how seemingly small design decisions can transform frustration into advocacy and turn transactional relationships into emotional ones.

At the center of the talk is a mindset that evolved into a design principle: "No other supplier would do that for you." We will explore how this principle influences product decisions, service design, customer operations and technology development, creating a consistent experience across every touchpoint.

The session will also address one of the biggest challenges for growing organizations: scaling empathy. How do you maintain a human experience when your customer base grows rapidly? How can technology enable better service instead of creating distance? And what role do product teams, UX designers and customer operations play in making that happen?