Customer Connection: Five steps to better relations with your most important client.
Jenny Roehm is senior manager for utility residential solutions at Schneider Electric. She works with utilities and customers to integrate a wide variety of separate assets and services – demand response, storage, on-site generation, and energy efficiency – into a single product platform.
One of the biggest hurdles on the road to home energy management and energy efficiency is engaging consumers. For the utility, engaging the consumer in two-way communication is increasingly important: It's about meeting consumer expectations, achieving consumer acceptance, and building customer satisfaction.
And these ideas gain a special importance now because the way that consumers interact with the grid is changing. Customers are turning to new technologies and energy sources, such as solar generation and electric vehicles. And just like you, they want grid reliability and better access to information to manage and control their own energy use. But they don't know how to do it. And they don't know where to turn.
The reality, in fact, is that most residential consumers aren't thinking about how to deepen their engagement with utilities. A recent survey from US Accenture tells the tale, finding that the average consumer thinks about electricity for only about nine minutes a year.