We recently attended a webinar by a company that provides energy specific subscription research and consultancy to energy providers and the industry’s value chain. The webinar explored the factors affecting the energy market and identified the success factors for the future of customer engagement to enable a fully personalized energy transition for customers. 

We wanted to share the insights and reveal how our customer engagement platform and solutions address the success factors identified, as well as how our solutions are also proven to improve engagement and reduce consumption in the water sector.

Here’s what we learned…

Top 3 factors currently affecting the energy market

  1. Customer need – heightened by the energy crisis in 2022-23, there’s an intense focus on minimizing bills
  2. Smart meter rollout – 165M homes (56%) equipped by the end of 2022. 14 countries reached 80% EU target deployment.
  3. Market competitiveness – Energy retail needs to support customers. There’s competition from within and outside sector.

What’s the future for customer engagement?

Customer engagement will need to evolve. Why? Because competition will intensify as players seek whole home energy visibility and management. They predict an anticipated 14% average annual increase up to 2040 in registered energy insights users.

According to research, influencing behavior change will require a stronger customer engagement toolkit. Why? Because…

  • Customer motivations have changed due to increased complexity in the home and personalized energy transition path
  • Customer’s will require a choice of energy insights and information about their whole home coverage
  • Customer prompts will need to deliver empowering insights for action with time-appropriate engagement

According to the consultancy’s market research, the key success factors for customer engagement will be engagement programs that are personalized, and that include action led insights and push communications. 

Advizzo’s solution

We’re delighted to share that our customer engagement platform and solutions for energy and water utilities tick all three boxes – and a whole lot more! Here’s how we can help your customers reduce their consumption.

Personalized communications

For any supplier to influence a positive change in their customer’s behavior, the customer has to trust them. That involves regular, positive and proactive interactions that demonstrate that the provider cares about the customer and is invested in providing a quality service. Taking the customer on a user-led journey is a very good way to achieve this. 

With a flick of an API, our fully personalized online widgets can give each customer full visibility of their energy or water usage, as well as useful insights into how they are using their energy and water, and importantly, how they can reduce their consumption. Giving data back to users via a personalized and friendly online interface builds trust, but also encourages engagement, reduces complaints and improves customer satisfaction. 

Action led insights

We help utilities create a user-led customer experience by plugging in our APIs and combining it with multiple data sources such as metering, tariff, open-source or customers’ own input. We then help deliver a personalized online customer engagement experience based on an individual’s personal data. 

Using historical consumption alongside disaggregated usage data, we create and communicate tailored tips to help customers reduce their consumption, make changes at home and therefore behavioral their bills and their impact on the planet. Our neighbor comparison widget has proven impact and has shown to help customers change towards more sustainable behaviors. 

Push communications

We’ve long recognized that providing customers with a choice as to how they engage with their supplier is essential. Every customer is different and therefore their online experience needs to be personalized with options as to how communications and information are received and accessed. We display insights and information relating to consumption patterns and behaviors in ways that are both meaningful and actionable and via the customer’s chosen methods by which to receive them.

In addition…we help suppliers to measure, analyse, report and track their efforts and results – to achieve Net Zero and retain that status. How do we do that? We measure an individual household’s consumption using smart and non-smart meter data. Then, having recommended measures to reduce consumption, we can track results and correlate them with carbon emissions. This helps our clients report on their GHG Scope 3 goals.

What’s more… we can get your customer engagement solution up and running far quicker than it would take you to develop an in-house solution. It’s taken us six years to develop our best-of-breed customer engagement platform. But because we have the science and the technology refined and ready to roll, once we have the required data from you, we can have your customer engagement solution up and running within a matter of weeks. That’s why our ‘plug and play’ solution is fast becoming the go-to customer engagement solution for water companies and energy suppliers across the globe. Discover why our off-the-shelf solution is a no brainer

Proof it works

We know it works, and so do our clients. But don’t just take our word for it. Take our on-going work with Anglian Water. In a 12 month trial engagement, we tested ‘nudging’ on a subsection of Anglian Water’s customers. Using a unique water consumption portal, residential customers received ‘nudges’ informing them how they were doing in terms of water consumption and rating their use against similar households in the area. Discover how the nudge theory can help customers reduce consumption.

We provided these insights by analyzing the residential meter data and educating customers through behavioral science techniques, such as social norm messages and incentives. The result – an 8% water consumption reduction in the 12 months. That’s 12,500 liters of water saved per day. That’s the same as 156 baths or 166 showers saved every day! Read more about how we’re helping Anglian Water’s customers reduce their water consumption!