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Articles by Rob Girvan
Customer Care Roundup: Recent Must-Read Posts From Fellow Community Members
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Greetings Customer Care members! As U.S. states begin to allow businesses to reopen, we’re seeing the light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel. There are sure to be more challenges ahead, but utilities are starting to think about life post-pandemic. Your fellow community members have been looking ahead to what the new customer care normal could look like.
Gain a Customer Satisfaction Bump during and after COVID-19
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Community Solar Program Billing Solved
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. In an effort to enable those that want to support, participate in, and/or benefit from solar energy resources, but may not own the physical premise to host solar panels, utilities are embracing Community Solar programs at a fast pace. SEIA reports that the next five years will see the U.S. community solar market add as much as 3.4 gigawatts.
COVID-19 - The Great Rate Debate
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. image credit: depositphotos.com COVID-19 has created unique regulatory and recovery challenges. COVID-19 has increased cost, decreased demand, increased uncollectable revenue, and for some utilities, delayed scheduled rate increases. The majority of state regulators have approved some regulations to allow utilities to recover COVID-19 related costs and lost revenue.
How to Reassess Pricing Pilot Data with COVID-19 Impacts
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Pricing pilots are a key step for Utilities on the path to large scale alternative rate programs. The objectives of pricing pilots vary, but some of the main goals include measuring the behavioral impact of price incentives and testing rate education and marketing strategies.
A Sidecar Solution for Complex Billing
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Complex rates can be designed to match true energy costs with the amount the customer is billed. This can have tremendous benefits in reducing overall customer bills and flattening the load curve. Realizing the benefits of complex rates requires enabling technologies, such as smart meters, smart thermostats and other smart devices.
COVID-19 Utilities Customer Experience - Up Your Game
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. It’s possible you headed into the COVID-19 crisis thinking your customer experience game is already strong. That’s great—but I’d encourage you to think again. – Forbes.com COVID-19 is affecting nearly every aspect of Utility Operations, especially Customer Engagement. More than 30 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March.
CIS Systems: Not the Path for Innovation
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Customer Information Systems (CIS) are the central nervous system for the Customer Line of Business within Utilities. They are heavily integrated and complex systems centered around the utility meter to cash process and act as the cash register for Utilities.
Time Of Use Rate Transition Best Practices
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. If your utility does not yet provide TOU rates or only offers them on a limited basis, chances are that will change very soon. “About half of U.S. investor-owned utilities have optional time varying rates for residential customers.
Utility Management Roundup: Recent Must-Read Posts From Fellow Community Members
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Greetings Utility Management Group members. The COVID-19 pandemic is on everyone’s mind and your fellow community members are here to help you manage your utility effectively through this crisis.
Accurate Revenue Planning During COVID-19? Utilities, here’s how...
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COVID-19 and Daily Bill Calculations
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. COVID-19 has changed the financial outlook for utilities virtually overnight. The coronavirus economic freeze could cost 47 million jobs and send the unemployment rate past 32%, according to St. Louis Fed projections. – cnbc.com On March 30th, Forbes reported that the New York power grid was experiencing a 7% reduction in load.
A Customer Engagement Best Practice from outside the Utilities Industry
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software is a term used to describe software systems that help sellers quote complex and configurable products and help customers explore options and pricing for different product configurations.
Whole Population Rate Analysis for Strategic Rate Design
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. image credit: depositphotos.com Whole Population Rate Analysis is the process of calculating bills for an entire utility’s customer population on a current and alternative rate plans using each customer’s individual historic load profile.
Customer Care Roundup: Recent Must-Read Posts From Fellow Community Members
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Greetings Customer Care members! The coronavirus (COVID-19) is on everyone’s mind and your fellow community members are here to help you maintain quality customer care through this crisis.
The Next Big Thing in Customer Engagement
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Improving customer engagement has dual benefits for utilities, increased rate of return through rate cases and reduced operational cost by reducing customer support costs.
Utility Product Lifecycles - They do exist.
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Product life cycle management is defined as follows: “In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception, through engineering design and manufacture, to service and disposal of manufactured products”. In the utility industry, the predominant products are rates, or tariffs.
Can Price Transparency Improve Customer Satisfaction for Utilities?
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. “Transparency in business is when a brand maintains open, honest, and accessible communications and relationships with internal and external stakeholders.” – adroll.com In the last several years, Utilities have made great strides in building transparency with consumers by investing in customer engagement technologies.
How Utilities can better serve Commercial and Industrial Customers during the COVID-19 Crisis
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Load profiles for C&I customers have changed drastically in recent weeks. Utility Dive reports that Italy’s peak demand has reduced 19 – 20%, due to large-scale restaurant, entertainment, office tower, and factory shut-downs. In contrast, essential goods and food businesses, as well as some medical device manufacturers, are hiring by the thousands.
Customer Care Roundup: Recent Must-Read Posts From Fellow Community Members
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Greetings Customer Care members! As your utility needs to compete for customers, you can use both big and small initiatives to help attract and retain. A high-level overhaul involving a shift from “customer service” to “customer experience” mentality is an example of a large effort that could have a big impact.
Enterprise Rating Engines can be a Strategic Asset for Electric Utilities
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. Most Utilities have a rating engine within their Customer Information System (CIS) for accurately calculating each customer’s bill based on their monthly electricity usage. The rating engine, sometimes also referred to as a billing engine, is tightly integrated within the CIS and calculates the monthly bill within the meter to cash cycle.
High Speed Bill Simulation can help increase adoption of Community Solar, EVs, Time-of-Use rates, and other Green Programs
WARNING: SIGN-IN You need to be a member of Energy Central to access some features and content. Please sign-in or register to continue. The past 5 years has seen an explosion in the number of products being offered by Electric Utilities, including community solar, rooftop solar, EV adoption programs and time-of-use rates. Many utilities offer community solar programs, basically an alternative to rooftop solar for people that can’t put solar on their rooftops, such as renters.
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