Accenture’s 2014 finding that the average energy customer spends just nine minutes a year thinking about their energy consumption must be the most quoted statistic in the energy industry – certainly delegates at a recent utility software conference in Miami returned to it time and again as proof of the urgent need to improve their relationships with consumers.
As the three-day event wore on, however, interpretation of the popular statistic changed. Delegates, mostly directors from US energy suppliers but also representatives from international energy-efficiency advisers and Eon (the sole European supplier participant), began the event by using the nine-minute figure as an easy weapon to whip up a whirlwind of well-meaning ideas about how to increase the amount of time customers give them.
However, by the end of the event a more considered consensus had emerged – that utilities should not aspire to intrude more into the already busy lives of their customers, but must instead seize opportunities to make every one of those nine minutes count.
At the moment, said one speaker, many utilities are “squandering” those valuable minutes of engagement and allowing predictable negative publicity, like seasonal news stories about imminent high bills, to damage their ability to connect with consumers.
A proactive and personalised approach to assessing when the nine minutes of attention are given to energy by individuals is required. Utilities must convert those moments into positive experiences and position themselves favourably to provide the new, data-reliant services that are widely agreed to be so important to future profitability.
From a technology perspective, there were myriad announcements in Miami to support these goals. A new and genuinely intuitive customer segmentation tool linked with capabilities to send tailored home energy reports and efficiency tips was put through its paces multiple times in the demo lounge, impressing many with the breadth of customer demographic permutations available for selection.
This too is significant because of the sensitivity that will be required if utilities want to succeed in engaging customers. Giving the wrong energy efficiency tips to a customer, for example, can result in frustration and disillusionment. Tips should take account of what a utility knows about the customer’s views on invasion of privacy, house size and even climate-change scepticism. Also, the tool identifies and maintains control groups, supporting robust research into energy consumption trends and strategic planning in utilities.
As well as the segmentation tree, Opower – the conference host and customer engagement software vendor – released new business intelligence tools to strain actionable insight from customer data. Also new for 2015, an enhanced customer care interface for call centres and a product called Marketplace, which connects consumers with locally available products and services that support energy efficiency.
Aside from technology tools for customer engagement, the conference was packed with tips and advice that, in the US’s regulated monopoly market, were freely shared between a range of energy companies.
“Celebrate anniversaries,” advised Simon Bailey, a customer engagement and satisfaction expert from the modestly named Brilliance Institute. It’s a simple step to contact customers every year on the day that they joined you and thank them or reward them he said – adding that he was sure many people were already practising this obvious approach, prompting self-conscious, guilty foot-shuffling among his audience.
Expanding on the theme of rewards, there was considerable discussion about how to leverage incentives in a timely and strategic way. While shared experience confirmed that offering the opportunity to win high street or internet retail vouchers and other treats in return for engagement is important, pilot schemes also showed that informed customers often do not need constant rewards to sustain their engagement. Once bought into the importance of, for example, a local energy target or ambition, mounting evidence shows that customers will act altruistically to ensure its success – if they are given the right up-front prompts.
The critical element in winning this engagement is designing proactive and, again, tailored connection campaigns with customers – let them know when their usage is high and they are at risk of receiving an unusually high bill. Tell them how they can act to avoid it. US pilot schemes returned astonishing results by informing customers ahead of peak energy cost periods that a few simple actions would help keep their bills down – even for customers who were not on time-of-use tariffs and for whom, therefore, the benefits of engagement were diluted or distant.
Clearly the majority of the insights from this meeting were targeted at those operating in the US, where there is a need for utilities to comply with energy efficiency and demand-response requirements from regulators. But the discoveries these firms are making about engagement as a consequence of those requirements are entirely relevant to a European and UK environment where the relationships between utilities and their customers are under intense scrutiny.