American Gas - November 2012 - (Page 19)

inDustry insights in The knOW Ready, Set, Engage Utilities that engage customers can reduce costs, optimize efficiency programs, and boost customer satisfaction. Here’s how to identify and deploy the tools and techniques that will deliver effective customer engagement. A jeff gibbons is vice president, corporate growth, at icf international ll utilities interact with their customers. But in today’s increasingly mobile, socially connected, time-constrained world, are you effectively engaging with them? Customer engagement must move beyond the traditional mass mailings to the entire base. Instead, it now combines both utility and nonutility datasets to deliver the right message to the right customers at the right time to help you achieve your desired results. With truly engaged residential and business customers, you’re more likely to see greater participation in energy-efficiency and demand-response programs, better results from your marketing dollars, increased return on investment from capital and operational expenditures, and higher ratings on customersatisfaction surveys. Customer engagement can deliver business value in a variety of ways. First, customer engagement can provide you with a wealth of data you can use for continuous improvement of your offerings. That’s important, because as energy-efficiency programs mature, utilities will have a harder time achieving incremental savings even as regulatory agencies ratchet up savings targets. An engaged customer base will be more likely to respond to your offerings. Second, customer engagement can reduce burdens on customer service reps and lower call-center operational costs. Well-designed multimedia communications with consistent but personalized messaging can increase customer self-sufficiency. Targeted outreach to customers who can benefit from specific offerings demonstrates that you’re concerned about their well-being. Third, customer engagement can help you better predict savings from energy-efficiency and demand-response programs. A clearer understanding of who’s on the other side of the meter, combined with greater certainty about the amount and geographic distribution of program savings, can help you optimize program delivery. Getting Smarter The availability of relevant data is changing rapidly. Energy-efficiency and specializedbilling programs have enabled utilities to gather more detailed data on a growing subset of their customer base. Smart utilities have used these opportunities to amass information about their customers and their usage patterns, building profiles, installed equipment, demographic or firmographic characteristics, and past program participation. These data points give utilities a better picture of their customers and enable them to develop and target more personalized offers. What’s more, utilities have an increasing ability to benchmark their regional efficiency and special-rate programs against similar offerings on a regional and national basis to identify opportunities for improvement. They can also compare local participation to relevant nonutility datasets to predict participation rates for specific customer segments. From that data, utilities can identify new program recruits based on likelihood of participation and savings opportunities. They can also home in on customer segments that are over- or underperforming, and analyze messaging and marketing channels to figure out why. And they can weed out the 20 percent to 30 percent of the customer base that’s unlikely november 2012 AmericAn GAs 19

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Gas - November 2012

American Gas - November 2012
Table of Contents
President’s Message
Industry News
Ask AGA
Search Engine
In the Know
Part One: Pipelines
Company Profiles
Places to Be
Jobline
Advertisers Index
Noteworthies
Marketplace
Facts on Gas

American Gas - November 2012