The Importance of Providing Usage Insights to your Utility Customers

March 4, 2022

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Are you providing your customers real time usage data and trends? If not, you’re missing a huge opportunity to enhance utility customer engagement and improve customer satisfaction levels. By simply providing your utility customers with usage data and analytics, you can dramatically transform the customer experience for the better.

In fact, a report from Deloitte found that 55 percent of millennials (now the largest consumer market in the world) are interested in energy management. Utility customers expect their utility providers to do more than ever before to help them manage their energy in a way that allows them to both reduce costs, and lead more environmentally-friendly lifestyles.

That’s why proactively sending your customers utility usage data is crucial. In this blog we take a look at why this is so important for utility providers, and how you can do it. 

Why is it so Important to Provide Utility Customers with Usage Insights?

Across almost every industry in the world there has been a rise in personalized customer experiences. Customers now expect better interactions, easy to use communication channels and utility engagement that is tailored to their specific needs.

This improved customer experience has set a new standard of the customer experience for utility providers – an industry that has traditionally been slow to invest in the area due to little, or no, competition. 

{{cta(‘0b3b6342-8a5e-4485-aa96-af0fb64bae78′,’justifycenter’)}}

Now there’s no longer an excuse. Customers demand this same level of service from their utilities as the other businesses they purchase from. Thankfully, there are a number of ways that utility providers can deliver a personalized experience and improve customer satisfaction levels.

One of the most important ways is to provide utility customers with insights into their energy and water usage. 

Developing a strategy that focuses on customer utility usage insights, and then delivering those in personalized reports to the customer, is a seamless way to improve the customer experience and meet customer expectations head on. 

Thankfully, the rise of data-rich smart homes, smart metering solutions and innovative utility customer portals have made it easier for utilities to both collect the required data and seamlessly send it to their customers.

Important Utility Usage Insights you can Send to Your Utility Customers

So, how can you best send insights to your energy and water utility customers in a way that enhances their experiences and drives up satisfaction? The answer is within a self-service customer portal solution.

Through the use of a customer portal solution, your utility can easily interact with its customers and send purpose-built utility usage reports that educate and mobilize utility customers to change their behaviours. 

You can directly send the information your customers need to improve their energy efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint, conserve water, reduce their monthly bills and reach their own utility usage goals. 

Provide your customers with easily-consumable, personalized insights and recommendations that encourage them to improve their energy and water usage. Important insights include:

  • An easy to read display of the customer’s energy and water consumption on a daily/weekly/monthly frequency
  • Usage comparison feature to  compare one home owner’s energy and water consumption with similar homes within their area 
  • Predicted billing based on the user’s historical billing periods 
  • Offering recommendations on how customers can save money, reduce consumption, and reduce their carbon footprint

The result? You’ll enhance the customer experience by providing them with a seamless platform where they can view all of their information, you’ll improve customer satisfaction by helping customers reach their goals, and you’ll be in a far better position to achieve your utility’s own internal efficiency and sustainability goals. 

What’s not to love? If you’re interested in learning more, get in touch with SilverBlaze today. Our innovative Customer Portal for Utilities has partnered with the Adaptive Consumer Engagement (ACE) data presentment platform to offer our client’s utility customers personalized information.

{{cta(‘2b7d1ae2-2dcc-404c-8947-970f7deb02c6′,’justifycenter’)}}

It’s time to stop worrying about all the issues that come with low customer engagement, and instead, transform your operations to become the leading utility company in your area.

Quick Links: