BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tendril®, the leading provider of Energy Services Management (ESM) solutions, today announced enhancements to its ESM Platform that allow Energy Service Providers (ESPs) to deliver a truly personalized customer experience. This new functionality links outputs from Tendril’s patented home simulation model with new insight capabilities, unlocking a deeper understanding of a consumer’s propensity to act.
Targeting customers based on their individual habits and preferences, and then delivering them personalized offers, messages and alerts is proven to increase opt-in rates. According to pilot programs in progress today, this approach delivers participation rates of 5-15 percent, compared to the 1-3 percent success rates achieved through traditional methods. As a result, micro targeting and personalization can significantly improve the impact of existing programs, like energy efficiency or demand management, and drive increased revenue by broadening service offerings to include everything from new tariffs to solar panels, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, LED lighting and other home upgrades.
“After years of covering the energy industry, it is clear to me that the time has arrived to quickly move beyond business as usual,” said Carol L. Stimmel, founder and CEO, Manifest Mind. “Traditional energy providers have been grappling for years with challenges to their traditional business model, but with the influx of intermittent renewables onto the grid, making concrete moves towards a consumer-oriented and personalized service model is now an imperative.”
While most consumer-facing companies are putting an emphasis on marketing to the “customer of one,” the energy market has yet to make the leap. With a primary focus on delivering a critical commodity, traditional providers have largely overlooked the power of data to serve the individual needs of customers. But this has to change if they are to survive and thrive in the age of the enlightened consumer.
About the Tendril ESM Platform
Tendril’s ESM Platform is the technology underpinning for the requisite transformation. It aggregates vast amounts of energy consumption data and combines it with publicly available information about homes and the people who live in them from services like Experian. This information is then analyzed by Tendril’s proprietary home simulation model to paint a complete picture of the individual, including their demographic, buying behaviors and propensity to respond to different types of messages. The Tendril ESM Platform then employs a unique suite of tools and an elegant user interface to deliver those highly targeted and personalized messages via a wide variety of online and offline channels.
Tendril’s ESM Platform was designed for and supports both traditional energy companies like utilities and energy retailers, as well as new market entrants like solar, cable and telecommunications companies. By building simple queries, ESPs can tap into Tendril’s SaaS-based platform and intelligently identify customers who have a propensity to opt in to specific programs and services. This targeted outreach, as well as the ability to personalize for deeper levels of ongoing engagement, establishes new market players, opens up new revenue streams, increases the profit margin or efficacy of existing programs, and boosts customer satisfaction and service ratings.
How It Works
For traditional energy providers looking to generate increased participation in programs like energy efficiency or demand response, or are seeking to cross-sell or up-sell other offerings and services, a typical query might look like:
- Identify residential consumers who spend more than 40 percent of their energy on HVAC on days when the temperature is above 80 degrees; who own their homes; have incomes below $30,000; and live in the North Eastern United States.
For new market entrants like solar companies that are trying to segment a particular region and identify only those with a pre-defined propensity to install rooftop solar in the next two years, a typical query might look for:
- Homes in Lincoln, NE over 3,000 square feet; made of brick; with a pool and central air conditioning; with more than three inhabitants, etc.
In each case, the Tendril ESM platform ingests the detailed query and outputs a list of potential customers along with a customized calculation of the benefit to each customer if they adopt that program or service, as well as a personalized engagement profile.
Below is the five-step reciprocal process the Tendril ESM Platform employs:
- Create – Choose message type and add custom inputs to power a personalized and highly relevant customer experience
- Segment – Specify an audience by defining geographic constraints, demographics, building details, energy usage patterns, savings constraints and behavioral propensities
- Personalize – Confirm final message details, create personalized content (including product/service offers, action requests, challenges or alerts), and specify the preferred channel for each individual
- Market – Schedule a launch date and time, and deliver the personalized messages and offers to customers
- Measure – Monitor current and past offer performance to influence future offer design and calculate campaign ROI
“Consumer centricity is the new standard and anyone who hopes to serve the energy market going forward must adapt,” said Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril. “For energy providers, who have traditionally outsourced a lot of their consumer programs, we offer a simple way to segment their population and create personalized offerings in an instant. For new market entrants, we provide accurate, disaggregated home energy predictions without access to historical consumption information—dramatically improving their ability to target the right homes for their services. The future is personalized energy services and we are paving the way for success.”
Availability
The Tendril ESM Platform with micro targeting and personalization capabilities is currently being piloted with select customers. It will be commercially available in Q3 2014.
Supporting Resources
- Micro Targeting and Personalization animation
- Energy Services Management white paper
- Physics-based Building Model white paper
- The Tendril blog
About Tendril
Tendril is defining data-driven Energy Services Management (ESM) for the evolving energy market. Our open, cloud-based software platform provides the infrastructure, analytics and understanding required to deliver personalized energy services. This targeted approach drives new business opportunities, delights consumers and has led to some of the industry’s highest engagement and satisfaction rates. For more information, please visit http://www.tendrilinc.com or follow us on Twitter at @Tendril.
