Consumer engagement front and center

 

IT WAS A BUSY WEEK IN LATE OCTOBER, AS BOTH THE SMART Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) and J.D. Power and Associates released reports on electricity consumer behavior.

SGCC's report, Excellence in Consumer Engagement, examined customer engagement strategies and tactics used to engage with their consumers from a range of smart grid programs across the United States. Of more than 1,500 customer-facing smart grid programs in the U.S., the study researched and analyzed approximately 150 of them and focused on 21 specific programs, including those from 14 IOUs, four municipal utilities, two co-ops and one nonprofit, all with programs in the field long enough to have some meaningful measures of program performance.

"It became clear," wrote Patty Durand, SGCC's executive director, in the report's introduction, "that many have focused on answering similar questions across a range of programs: What types of messages should I communicate? How do I engage the vocal minority? What can I do to drive program enrollment?"

Rather than offer definitive answers, the report posits 10 basic themes, or tenets, backed up within the pages by supporting evidence from the utilities themselves. Within each tenet, there are many utility examples. I've chosen but a few to share here.

• TENET: Internal messaging and education improve engagement.

 

•  EXAMPLE: Portland General Electric used a 60-person team with representatives from across the organization (installation team, customer relations, media relations, etc.); oversaw AMI deployment, trained installation team to field common customer questions and coordinate deployment schedule with call center; AMI deployment received very few persistent or formally filed complaints.

 

• TENET: Attitudinal segmentation may improve program messaging.

 

• EXAMPLE: AEP Ohio developed six psychographic-based segments, and looked at each segment across four energy usage levels to identify high-likelihood, high-value customers, but to date have only used this scheme to aid in plot design. They believe their segmentation scheme has worked well in pilot and plan to use it in the future to target programs to customers that are both likely to enroll and also have high energy reduction potential.

 

• TENET: Urgency and purpose spur customers to act.

 

• EXAMPLE: The Climate and Energy Project used a competition model with finite duration to drive behavioral change; leaders found that it was easy to engage residents in the competition once they made one-on-one contact.

 

The same day, J.D Power and Associates released its 2011 Smart Energy Consumer Behavioral Segmentation Study. The first in a planned series, this report identified six behavioral segments, based on the types of smart energy activities and degree of control that diverse customer populations will undertake to manage their consumption, costs and environmental impact.

While the SGCC's report is openly available on the collaborative's Web site, the J.D. Power report is only available for purchase.

Consumer engagement is currently a hot topic. These are unlikely to be the last we'll see of these types of reports.