A big round of applause goes to PSE&G and Con Edison! Two of Uplight’s clients have won CS Week’s Expanding Excellence Awards in the Innovation in Digital Customer Engagement categories. Awards are presented to utilities that have developed an innovative, high-tech or technologically complex approach to improving customer service in the meter-to-cash customer experience lifecycle during 2020 or 2021.

Con Edison: Helping Business Customers Understand Their Bills

Con Edison has partnered with Uplight since 2018 to help drive the success of a smart meter roll-out and an initiative to improve customer service and satisfaction through delivering modern, digital customer experiences. 

As part of creating more personalized customer experiences, Con Edison worked with Uplight to add energy usage and billing “widgets” to the My Account web + mobile app experience for business customers. These widgets help answer common questions like “why did my bill change?”, “how did my energy consumption change from the same month last year?,” and “how can I save on my bill?.”

This overhaul enabled a more seamless, multi-channel experience that serves all business customers and their specific energy use and cost management needs. Additionally, these personalized widgets have helped drive a massive 2-4x increase in self-service activity and 2-3x increase digital customer engagement.

To complement their My Account and mobile app experience, Con Edison has worked with Uplight to design a proactive outbound marketing program that helps customers understand the benefits of their newly installed smart meter called, “Welcome to Your AMI Meter,” and personalized monthly energy reports to help customers keep track of their energy use and find ways to save energy.

PSE&G: Making the Marketplace More Inclusive

PSE&G first launched their energy Marketplace to sell rebated smart thermostats in 2018 with Uplight. Within four months of launching the Marketplace, PSE&G met its 2-year goal of selling over 36,000 smart thermostats, delivering significant energy and demand savings while providing industry-leading customer satisfaction, as measured by a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 92.

Building off that success, PSE&G looked at how it could expand the Marketplace to reach more customers, so added more products and rebates to provide a wider range of offerings in the most cost-effective manner. The PSE&G Marketplace has been relentlessly focused on being more inclusive so all customers benefit from being able to obtain energy efficient products that fit their lifestyle. Here are just a few examples of the actions the utility has taken:

• To reach non-digital audiences, PSE&G deployed a direct mail postcard campaign that obtained higher than expected purchases per benchmarks of previous campaigns that Google ran with other utility marketplaces.
• To increase awareness for other hard-to-reach audiences, PSE&G and Uplight ran several direct mail campaigns targeted low-to-moderate income (LMI), new movers and multifamily customers. 
• The utility launched free shipping for all orders, which they recognized had been a deterrent in the past for customers and would make it easier for customers to purchase low-cost products such as LED light bulbs. Free shipping continues for customers today. 

PSE&G’s focus on engaging harder-to-reach customer segments and getting energy-efficient products to all customers makes PSE&G stand out from other utilities. In fact, PSE&G has driven some of the highest volumes of rebated energy efficient products to their customers and have become one of the largest Marketplaces in terms of products sold in the U. S.