Solving the consumer conundrum

Once upon a time, electric utilities and their customers lived in a world with little need to interact except over billing and power outages. Over the last few years, that has changed dramatically. Government mandates to reduce peak loads, modernize the grid and engage customers have utilities scrambling to become more dynamic and better support their customers’ lives.

Customer engagement is not just a valuable end in itself. It also serves as the engine for powerful demand response and energy efficiency programs. Yet consumers aren’t accustomed to building relationships with their power providers, beyond calling to dispute a bill or report an outage.

1. Story Telling 

Package energy data which are consumed by househould can be determined by using language that consumers understand that relates those stories directly to their lives. Better to say  how many dollars of energy a bedroom is using every day than grasping the concept of kilowatt-hours used per month for the entire house. 

Always better to avoid industry jargon and introduce the concets which every common man understand the terminology for better benefits to the consumer

2 Fun learning 

      With the advent of gadgets and apps on tablets and mobile it become very easy to present the data clear and intertesting way . Better way to engage customers is making enjoyable experience with introduction of data in visual format dashboards and Messaging  With this type of learning customers care about and invite it into their lives

       3. Action items

       Smart meters make real-time data possible. Now, customers can see the impact based on what they’re doing right now, enabling them to draw a clear connection between cause and effect. Presenting just the right data, at the right time, and in the right context is vital to drive customer behavior change.

    

       4.Respect the customer:

      Don’t force customers to do anything they don’t want to do. Instead, give customers the power to join programs, be honest and thoughtful with them about the benefits and drawbacks, and let them opt-out without hassle. Said another way: don’t demand response, ask nicely.

 5. Empower customers: People change behavior when they have knowledge that makes action irresistible. Key to this is enabling technology like smart thermostats or in home displays which present easy-to-access, understandable energy information. Recently, one of our customers commented, “Before, I didn’t make any changes because I was not aware of the impact of everything I did—now I know!”

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Big Data and Demand Response

Utilities are collecting unprecedented amounts of information from millions of smart meters installed in recent years, but the capacity to collect data seems largely to have overwhelmed companies and regulators. Processes designed for a world run on paper billing and planned excess capacity are of diminishing effectiveness in one defined by interactive usage and distributed generation.

This opened door for data scientists and data startups to compete with some of the established business service providers themselves rushing to better understand, analyze and use the insights raw data can provide.  Most of the vendors advice and analytics for power bills the old fashioned way – door-to-door – and is taking the insight it has into customer priorities and matching that to generator priorities as market rules and operating realities shift.

power tariffs enable customers to save money by limiting use during certain peak energy use “events,” the kind of program that has been in place around the country for years, but adoption has been limited in part because “the conversation about tariffs at commissions and in utilities is very divorced from the reality on the ground, which is focused 

The installation of smart meters is set to accelerate and provide ever more detailed information to a wide variety of firms and customers in energy and beyond, and companies  will be providing the next level of analysis and engagement based on that data to help companies and regulators move forward with segmenting, prioritizing and putting into action their plans and objectives based on data-driven insights.