Why utilities need to optimise customer-centric energy management models
Enlit Editorial Team
Posted on: 1 February 2024
Although consumer engagement provides endless product opportunities for utilities, barriers to its uptake persist, explains Sean Layerle.
Although customer engagement provides endless opportunities for utilities to tap into, including for energy efficiency, grid flexibility and distributed generation, barriers still abound, explains Sean Layerle, Managing Director of CInsights.
The increasing centrality of customers in the energy transition has translated into numerous opportunities for utilities to tap into but the critical question of how to fully leverage these opportunities remains.
In an exclusive interview at Enlit Europe 2023, Layerle explains that he believes this is because the energy sector's comfort zone primarily lies in technical aspects such as infrastructure, devices and analytics, there is a tendency to develop solutions and insights that may not align with what customers are seeking.
"In the sector," he says, “we love to look at energy consumption data. We love to think of all the algorithms we could run on this data (and) all the possible insights that can be generated from the data.
“And so we have, unfortunately, a tendency to develop a tremendous amount of solutions for problems that maybe don't exist, or insights that maybe customers aren't looking for, that might be interesting to us, who are very passionate about the energy sector, want to accelerate the energy transition, but maybe don't speak to residential customers (or) business customers.”
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“We've seen a lot of building facility managers who have been walking around their building for years with a little notepad. You could give them an amazing dashboard, with all the data from connected devices in the building and they're still going to walk the building with their notepad and not use the dashboard.”
Layerle believes that this is one of the shifts that need to be emphasised in the energy sector – from technical to user-centric, striking a better balance between technical data analysis and understanding users' realities in both residential and business contexts.
This shift, he adds, is essential for prioritising digital solutions, customer engagement campaigns and product roadmaps that can then align with genuine customer needs.
