Upload
others
View
3
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
uplight.com
The Utility Customer Experience Investment
WHITE PAPER
Unlocking the Full Potential of Personalization
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
2Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Unlocking the Full Potential of Personalization
81% of consumers want
brands to understand
them better and know
when and when not to
approach them
Look around and it’s not hard to see: no matter which industry, we’re in the
midst of a revolution— in customer personalization. Thanks to innovations in
customer analytics pioneered by Amazon, Netflix, Pandora and others, not
only do companies have the ability to offer greater levels of personalization
and sophistication in the consumer experience—but customers are now
coming to expect this.
In a summary of how the customer experience landscape is changing, with
increasing connectivity across a multiplicity of devices, MarTech Today’s
Andy Betts has gathered a compelling list of trends1:
81% 50%>
More than 50% of
companies are
redirecting investments
towards customer
experience innovations
1 “A new era of personalization: The hyperconnected customer experience,” Andy Betts, January 23, 2018, MarTech, https:// martechtoday.com/new-era-personalization-hyper-connected-customer-experience-209529
60%
60% of marketers
struggle to personalize
content in real time, yet
77% believe real-time
personalization is crucial 94%
94% of marketers are
focusing on their data
and analytics capabilities,
personalization
technologies and
customer profile data
management capabilities
to deliver personalized
customer experiences
(Source: Accenture) (Source: Gartner)
(Source: Adobe)
(Source: Forrester/Janrain)
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
3Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Indeed, today’s marketers, customer experience
managers, and journey architects have the
right idea about where to concentrate their
personalization technology investments.
Modern customer personalization for any
organization requires leveraging customer data,
predictive analytics, and consistent delivery
of recommendations across any channel the
customer may reasonably expect (including
mobile, call center, IVR, portals, email, SMS
text, direct mail, even smart speakers).
But while utilities are starting to think about
the importance of this level of personalization,
many have not yet begun to develop the
initiatives required, to provide comprehensive
recommendations across communication
channels, or to manage and prioritize those
recommendations on an ongoing basis.
What’s more, getting to sophisticated and
accurate analytics-based personalization is
challenging enough for a consumer products
e-commerce company, where consideration must
be given to past purchase history, browsing
behavior, marketing campaign interactions and
available demographics. But for gas and electric
utilities, delivering the kind of personalized
experience that today’s customers have come
to expect is exponentially more difficult.
In addition to all of the above, utilities have to
factor in analysis of customers’ energy usage
(including average kWh load, peak periods, derived
cooling/heating degree days, etc.), rate plans,
income eligibility, program history, premise details
(heating/cooking fuels, age, square footage,
AC type, owner residency, single/multi-family,
etc.), creditworthiness, the weather, meter type,
geography, neighbor comparisons, outage history,
and much, much more!
Companies such as Amazon and Netflix, which are
heralded as the gold standard for personalization,
have the advantage of being able to focus their
energy primarily on websites and apps with the
singular goal of driving revenue. Utilities don’t
have this luxury. They are mandated to serve all
customers equally and must deliver on multiple
objectives, from driving revenue and reducing
costs to serving low-income communities,
achieving energy efficiency goals, improving
customer satisfaction, meeting regulatory
requirements, and improving operational
efficiency. The combination of these highly
disparate challenges can make embarking on
the journey of personalization seem daunting.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
4Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
The good news is, even given these extra
challenges, utilities can harness the abundant
customer data available to take advantage of
modern machine learning and analytics tools that
can deliver the personalization their customers
expect. The catch is—utilities unfortunately
can’t rely on the exact same personalization and
analytics strategies that retail-focused companies
use (and this even applies to utilities that are
trying to increase their own e-commerce revenue).
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
5Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
It All Starts with the Customer JourneyWhen talking about personalization, what we’re
really describing is the ability to understand the
customer’s world at a critical moment in their
journeys, and then putting the most useful and
attractive offer in front of them. If that offer
is grounded in a deep understanding of the
customer’s needs right there, then the likelihood
of that personalized offer being adopted
increases dramatically.
Retail companies typically make personalized
offers for a specific product or service they would
like to sell and is likely to be adopted. But for
an electric or gas utility, true personalization
must include a wider selection of messages that
support the utility’s diverse goals. These range
from energy products to new rates, EE programs,
savings tips, and safety messaging, as well as
expanded e-commerce offerings (advanced
thermostats, power strips, light bulbs, etc.); not
to mention, for some utilities, an ever-widening
array of value-added services, from installation to
appliance repair, to tree service, to energy storage,
to solar, to vehicle financing! In other words,
modern utilities have a much wider pool of
actions to recommend.
So for a utility to determine the optimum mix
of data, analytics and delivery, they first have
to identify the particular customer journeys
they would like to impact, which will then lead
to the pool of actions they want to recommend.
For example, a program focusing on low and
moderate income (or income- qualified) customers
would have actions offering discounted energy
rates, fuel assistance, home weatherization or bill
payment plans. By first establishing the customer
journeys and the related action pool, a utility
then opens the door to figuring out the required
collection of data and energy analytics necessary
to make their personalization story sing.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
6Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Putting Energy Analytics into ActionThe power of using state-of-the-art, yet proven,
analytics is that all applicable utility customers
can be evaluated to determine which action(s)
within the pool are most relevant to them at a
given time.
And the good news is, there are more options
out there than ever for businesses seeking to
better use analytics to create more personalized
experiences. For utilities, however, there’s a danger
of over-reliance on analytical approaches that
are primarily—or only—driven by e-commerce or
marketing campaign data. Although extremely
useful for consumer products companies,
data points that primarily rely on Web views,
MyAccount logins, shopping cart abandons,
click-through rates, etc.—though still valuable—
aren’t sufficient for powering the analytics
required to generate insights on a full portfolio
of utility actions.
In addition to e-commerce products like smart
thermostats, power strips and light bulbs,
utility actions can also include things like safety
messages, new billing plans, EE program
recommendations, and much more. Each of
these actions requires a specific mix of data and
personalization analytics to figure out the very
best action (and the second best, and the third,
etc.) to recommend to any customer based on
their unique situation and energy usage at a
particular moment.
So what kind of analytics are required for the
specialty needs of utilities? Generally, there are five
key categories of analytics that will be required
for utility personalization:
Each of these, of course, is a rich area of data
science, and applicable across lots of industries.
Where things get specific for utilities is the unique
mix of energy-related algorithms, regressions, tools,
models, and data sources, behind them.
Because “analytics” is a broad term, it can be useful
in the world of energy personalization to cluster
the various combinations of analytical methods
required for each personalized Next Best Action
(NBA) recommendation into conceptual groupings
that one might think of as “gears” (since, when put
together, they form the engine that powers the
utility personalization experience). Some of these
gears require utility-specific data; for example,
Average/Peak Load requires AMI data for a specific
customer. Similarly, others gears, such as Weather
Normalization or Cooling/Heating Degree Days,
combine utility data with third-party data sources,
such as local weather.
In this way, each desired action is driven by a
mix of gears that uncover the required energy
and customer insights to power utility
customer personalization.
1. Core Energy Analytics
2. Forecasting
3. Peer Analysis
4. Propensity
5. Ranking
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
7Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Solving the Data ProblemBelieve it or not, when it comes to utility analytics,
more data isn’t always better—it has to be the
right data. For example, through highly relevant
for retail sites, utility personalization can’t be
reliant solely on marketing interaction or web
traffic data.
Two more reasons for this are what’s referred to
as the Data Sparsity and the Cold Start problems.
Data Sparsity refers to the fact that most
e-commerce-optimized analytics assume quite
large sets of marketing interaction type data
to power recommendations. For large retailers,
this is the case. But most utility websites and/
or marketplaces have much, much lower volumes
of web visitors, and typical retail recommender
algorithms simply aren’t optimized for these
low interaction volumes to make accurate
NBA recommendations.
Similarly, the Cold Start problem refers to the
fact that most retail- focused personalization
analytics require a minimum monitoring period
before the system has gathered enough data
about customer interactions to start making NBA
recommendations (and even then, sufficiently
high volume of website traffic are necessary,
as noted above). For example, a common best
practice for e-commerce analytics is to let the
software observe website behavior for at least
30 days before launching—with the potential to
substantially delay and complicate the process
of launching new utility customer NBAs.
There’s some irony here, of course, because
utilities are overflowing with data! But many
horizontal solutions haven’t optimized their
analytics or data object models for the unique
needs of utilities. And adapting these can lead
to unnecessary implementation and operational
expenses, and limits the ability to quickly scale
up products and services.
Instead, utilities are better advised first to identify
the internal data needed to enable the gears
required, then to precision-source the necessary
third-party data from the many available
vendors, such as Acxiom, CoreLogic, Experian
and more. When done right, such a system can
be automated and scaled up as the number of
Actions, analytics—and needed data types—
increases over time.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
8Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Deliver, Optimize, Learn...Precision energy analytics and unified data are
critical, but they don’t do the utility any good
if those recommendations don’t get in front of
the customer wherever they are at the moment
of need. Real, end-to-end personalization,
then, means the ability to integrate consistent
messaging across any and all channels the
customer is present in—from call center to chat
to IVR to web to mobile to text to social media
to digital assistants.
Of course, each of these channels has its own
integration formats, standards and challenges.
Being able to support integration across any
channel requires putting the work in upfront
to ensure that data is unified and properly
structured, and is able to leverage flexible
APIs (application programming interfaces)
for integration. Integrating personalized
customer NBAs into the plethora of channels
available to utility customers can seem
daunting. It is important to develop a channel
strategy to capture the greatest business
value through planning, implementation,
training, metrics development and reporting.
By staggering delivery channel deployments,
lessons learned can be incorporated into each
successive implementation.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
9Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
However, even if personalized NBAs are
successfully deployed into every possible
customer delivery channel, there’s one more
mission-critical step before personalization can
be sustainably achieved—ongoing optimization.
This is because the various customer data inputs
that feed machine- learning based insights and
NBA recommendations are always changing. The
customer has a child, is laid off from work, buys a
more energy- efficient refrigerator or an electric
car, and suddenly their energy use profile changes:
recommendations should change accordingly.
In addition, every time a customer interacts
with their utility or adopts one of the products,
rates or programs recommended, fresh data
is generated, which can be fed back into the
analytics engine to improve future NBAs
delivered to that customer.
By combining continuous energy use analytics,
customer interactions, and what is already
known about available products and customer
profile history, this ongoing feedback optimization
can even proactively indicate the applicability
of a product the customer did not previously
qualify for. The result is a level of dynamic
engagement that delivers a game-changing
customer experience.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
10Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
Getting Started in the Real World
Personalization sounds like a great idea. But
how and where can a utility realistically get
started when facing a seemingly overwhelming
number of potential customer journeys, offers,
programs, products, messages and channels?
What’s more, any such new initiative could
require cross-departmental buy-in, changes
to well-established processes, and the need to
integrate into aging IT systems—all of which can
seem like a big enough challenge to make the
most hardened utility leader run for the hills.
Now, this is the part of the paper where we’re
supposed to describe the formula for easy
personalization for any utility. Rather, as impactful
to customers as personalization initiatives
are—from a new IVR to a re- architected Start/
Stop process—they can’t achieve their full
potential until data-driven, prioritized actions
are being successfully routed to every relevant
customer. What’s more, without data-driven
personalization, utilities will be unable to
fully gain the organizational benefits of these
recommendations, including OPEX savings, c-sat
improvement, additional revenue, and increased
program enrollment.
Fortunately, there is a manageable way to get
started. Like many projects, even enterprise-level
personalization is often best tackled by starting
small. One best-practice is to utilize a 1/10/2
approach. This means selecting one key customer
journey, ten related customer actions to serve up,
and two relevant channels, each of which should
be strongly aligned with both critical customer
needs and the utility’s current business objectives
(such as reducing repeat calls, increasing
customer satisfaction, and so on). By using this
approach, utilities can get started on the path
to customer personalization with a limited,
manageable scope that allows them to prove the
value and then expand with confidence over time.
THE UTILITY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INVESTMENT
11Copyright © 2019 Uplight, Inc. All rights reserved. uplight.com
For years, utility customers were content with
stable rates and limited exposure to outages,
but now they are expecting more across all utility
touch points. Following the lead of personalization
pioneers like Amazon and Netflix, personalization
techniques such as the ones we’ve described today
have proven effective in increasing value and
customer satisfaction across industries ranging
from retail to media to telecom to banking.
Utilities can leverage the success of these
personalization front-runners to achieve
material results for their organization and, more
importantly, for their customers. By starting
with single impactful customer journey, utilities
can apply proven technology to create a unified
view of customers across data sources, leverage
data science to match the right actions to each
relevant customer, and deliver these best-fit
actions to customers as appropriate.
This is modern personalization. With this
foundation utilities will be equipped not only to
better scale their growth to support an increasing
number of customer journeys and actions over
time, but ultimately, to deliver a better customer
experience for everyone.
However, even if personalized NBAs are
successfully deployed into every possible
customer delivery channel, there’s one more
mission-critical step before personalization can
be sustainably achieved—ongoing optimization.
This is because the various customer data inputs
that feed machine- learning based insights and
NBA recommendations are always changing. The
customer has a child, is laid off from work, buys a
more energy- efficient refrigerator or an electric
car, and suddenly their energy use profile changes:
recommendations should change accordingly.
In addition, every time a customer interacts
with their utility or adopts one of the products,
rates or programs recommended, fresh data
is generated, which can be fed back into the
analytics engine to improve future NBAs
delivered to that customer.
By combining continuous energy use analytics,
customer interactions, and what is already
known about available products and customer
profile history, this ongoing feedback optimization
can even proactively indicate the applicability
of a product the customer did not previously
qualify for. The result is a level of dynamic
engagement that delivers a game-changing
customer experience.
uplight.com
2580 55th St #100, Boulder, CO 80301
Interested in learning more about how Uplight can help you accelerate the clean
energy ecosystem? Send us a note [email protected] or visit www.uplight.com
Born from the merger of Tendril and Simple Energy, and the acquisitions
of FirstFuel, EEme, EnergySavvy and Ecotagious, Uplight is the leading
provider of end-to-end customer-centric technology solutions dedicated
solely to serving the energy ecosystem. Uplight provides software and
services to more than 75 of the world’s leading electric and gas utilities,
with the mission of motivating and enabling energy users and providers
to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem.
Uplight is the leader in Demand Side Management, Energy Analytics,
Utility Marketplaces, Utility Personalization, and Home Energy
Management. Together, these solutions form a unified, end-to-end
customer energy experience system that’s proven at enterprise scale, yet
nimble enough to deliver innovative solutions quickly. Utility leaders at all
levels rely on Uplight and its customer-focused digital energy experiences
to improve customer satisfaction, deliver energy and capacity outcomes,
reduce service costs, increase revenue, and reduce carbon emissions.
About Uplight