At a recent industry conference, Apogee Interactive’s Executive Vice President, Jim Malcom shared how utilities are engaging customers using personalized outbound communications. Apogee is the public power industry’s Hometown Connections preferred provider for Customer Engagement.
Apogee Presents the Power of Digital Engagement
Malcom presented results and conclusions from Apogee’s work with hundreds of municipals over several decades. In a case study from Lakeland Electric, Apogee’s EMPOWER digital engagement platform is achieving five-times greater digital participation than expected. Especially popular are the mid-cycle bill alerts to customers giving them time to change behavior before the high bill arrives. These alerts garnered open rates of 72%, 5 times the industry standard. In addition, whenever their bill is higher by a trigger amount, Lakeland customers receive a personalized video-bill explanation that achieved unique click through rates of 15%, seven times the industry standard of 2%. Lakeland enlisted a firm to gather feedback from customers about the platform that revealed 86% customer satisfaction among users.
Mr. Malcom drove his point home referencing J. D. Power’s 2018 and 2019 Utility Digital Experience Study that proves utilities continue to lag the retail sector by as much as 200 points on a 1000-point scale. He also cited Accenture studies that show digitally engaged customers are 80% more likely to take part in utility programs and 69% more satisfied.
“In this era of corporate giants like Amazon and Google and other aggregators eyeing our customer relationships, it is imperative utilities engage with customers in an ongoing dialogue.” Malcom continued, “Whoever gets the customer’s engagement and trust wins in this new era where disintermediation could leave the power company as simply providing wires to the home.” He added, “Prospering in these transitional times will require building strong customer relationships that are personal, relevant, and meaningful to customers.”
Apogee’s EMPOWER platform provides a turn-key digital marketing and communications strategy, that includes personalized video bill explanations, mid-cycle alerts, monetized energy recommendations, and energy forecasts that show daily energy costs in the context of the weather. The platform includes, videos with calls to action that drive program participation as well as its flagship online energy audit, Energy Advisor, that collects home profile data allowing utilities to further personalize and target messages to customers.
About Apogee
Apogee Interactive, Inc. is a woman-owned business and one of the nation’s leading full-service provider of proactive customer engagement SaaS services for utilities. As a partner with the utility industry since 1993, Apogee’s digital engagement platform delivers proactive, targeted, relevant, and personalized communication for hundreds of North American utilities, including some of the largest and most progressive, such as Lakeland Electric, Nashville Electric, LADWP, Electric Cities of GA and ElectriCities of NC. Apogee is the Hometown Connections Preferred Provider of Customer Engagement. For more information visit www.apogee.net or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/99046/.