Not so long ago, when a customer of Puget Sound Energy lost his job and couldn’t handle his bills, PSE might only learn of the customer’s troubles when he stopped paying his utility bills. Like most utilities, PSE would then have no choice but to disconnect the customer’s service.
Enter “Get to Zero.”
The PSE program, which ran from 2016 to 2020, offered self-service tools to help customers resolve their most common problems, including enabling them to apply for and receive low-income energy assistance. The program also was meant to help customers in this situation get the help and answers they need as simply as possible while reducing calls to the call center.
“It’s an exciting time to be working at PSE,” said Theresa Burch, PSE’s manager of customer solutions for billing and payments. “The hours might get long at times, but it is fulfilling to be able to help so many people. We’ve probably had 10 different departments and as many as 200 people involved in making this happen.”
As the post-COVID-19 world has clearly shown, meeting customers where they are is more of a priority than ever for utilities, which are leveraging new tools and technologies to make that happen.
When COVID-19 hit, the Get to Zero program had already positioned PSE to help customers most in need. Burch and her team of specialists were then tasked with getting $11 million in funds from unspent assistance money to customers recently unemployed because of the pandemic who needed help in paying their bills and reducing their balances to zero. But who were these customers? How much help did they need? What would be the easiest way to provide assistance?
These were just a few of the questions Burch and her team were trying to answer. The old way would have been to distribute funding to nonprofits in the area. The nonprofits would then accept applications for assistance, and those who were approved would receive funds to help with their utility bills.
The new way, thanks to data analytics, was much more direct. PSE turned to technology, along with creative thinking, to deploy a new platform, the EnergyHelp Portal, with the help of leading industry partner Avertra. Through analytics, PSE was able to pinpoint people in need. By correlating data from its customer information system with external data from credit report sites such as Experian, PSE was able to identify segments of customers. This could include, for example, customers who historically had paid their bills on time but who had fallen behind because of COVID-19, or customers who had received energy assistance in the past but not during the pandemic. Even today, says Burch, PSE continues to research customer segments to see who might be in need of assistance.
After being identified, customers would receive emails informing them of the program. Based on their needs, bills could be covered for up to six months.
However, because we live in such a scam-risk world, some customers couldn’t believe that PSE would help with their bills. To combat this, PSE assured customers through various channels of outreach, including email, U.S. Postal Service mail and social media. The first round of funds that PSE received was completely distributed in six months and helped about 15,000 customers.
“This activity had to be approved by the commission that oversees us as an investor-owned utility,” said Burch. “Then we were able to move ahead quickly. We wanted the system to be easy for customers. We tried to design assistance so they didn’t even have to call in.”
For example, customers who were auto-approved for the funding based on income assessments from past energy assistance were simply notified by email that they would see a credit on their bill—no action was needed on their part. Customers who were not in that group could apply for assistance through the PSE website or mobile app.
Burch also made sure to monitor the program’s success closely. Following the initial push of information and funding to customers in need, her team saw declining interest. “So, we emailed people in certain categories telling them they met requirements that would qualify them for assistance,” she said. “One criteria was whether COVID had caused their income to drop. This outreach brought in a couple thousand more people whom we could help.”
In fall 2020, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission issued a COVID-19 order that included a second round of funding equal to 1% of retail revenue, or $27.7 million. The customer solutions team was ready to use lessons learned from its earlier assistance to be even more efficient in taking care of customers, and television advertising was added to help spread the word. Some 7,800 customers had been prequalified based on past income qualification, and $1 million was disbursed in the first week. For most cases, the customers saw their outstanding balances owed to the company reduced to zero.
Leveraging data and analytics was one of the key elements of PSE’s successful distribution of the funds to customers in need.
In a fortunate coincidence, just three months before the pandemic hit in March 2020, PSE had finished implementing its Platform of Insights, or POI, which was built to aggregate and make sense of the storehouse of data the company had compiled about its customers through the years. That legacy storehouse was like having 100 file cabinets of information in 10 different buildings—and a quarter of the cabinets were locked. Using data analytics, PSE was able to parse that customer data into something akin to a single file folder full of useful information.
Claire Locke, PSE’s manager of customer insights, led the team that began to use the POI to learn how to best help customers. “We’re using this platform for multiple departments, including finance, auditing, system planning, energy efficiency and renewables,” she said. “The platform also helped us identify which customers might be having a problem and should be communicated with.”
When the COVID-19 crisis hit, she said, PSE noticed that many of its customers had growing unpaid balances. With the pool of money available from the WUTC, PSE needed to make them aware that help was there.
Locke and her data analytics team looked at the data to see how best to connect the right support programs to the nearly 200,000 customers who were late paying their PSE bills. “It became obvious that we needed to segment customers to personalize our communications to them. We started by segmenting our past-due customers into groups that were new to the collections process and those who had been through it before,” said Locke. “Some 40% of the people were new to collections, and the rest had some exposure to it. The vast majority reported that they had lost income due to COVID.”
The contrast was stark between the old way and the new way for Locke and her team. “Before we built the POI, we had more than 10 different systems storing customer data. We couldn’t access the data or answer questions about it,” she said. “Our goal for the new analytics system was to make customer data more accessible. Then, when COVID struck, the POI allowed us to pivot quickly.”
Moving through the pandemic, these analytics enabled the team to see the status of the massive number of accounts in a way that had not been possible before. “Average past-due customer balances have nearly doubled from pre-pandemic levels, and we’re heading toward the end of a disconnection moratorium,” said Locke. “Having the POI has allowed us to analyze an incredible number of different scenarios that have informed our collections resumption planning. We’ve been able to use the data to plan for a prioritized ramp-up in our collections, which will reduce the group of customers initially at risk for disconnection by 80%. This will give customers whom we think could be eligible for assistance more time to get it. It’s a win-win for both PSE and our customers.”
CS Week is Aug. 16–19
People want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Many utility professionals will seek to do just that at CS Week, set for Aug. 16–19 at Tampa Convention Center in Florida. It’s there they will meet people in the know, learn what’s new and plan to make a difference in their industries.
As the premier annual educational and customer service conference serving electric, gas and water/wastewater utility professionals, CS Week provides learning and networking opportunities in support of the utility customer experience life cycle: analytics, billing & payments, contact center, credit & collections, digital customer engagement, field services, and strategies & management.
For more information, go to www.csweek.org or call 903/893-3214.