LEXINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FirstFuel Software, the leader in business customer engagement for the energy industry, today announced it has expanded its global share of the utility market, growing its total number of clients in North America and Europe to 40 utilities. These new utilities – including FirstEnergy, National Grid, and Alliant – have engaged FirstFuel to meet a variety of core business customer goals, including improved service and satisfaction, reduced service costs, new program and service deployment and increased revenue and load growth.
One of those new clients is Electric Ireland, which supplies electricity, gas, and energy services to more than 95,000 businesses in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Electric Ireland set out to improve customer experiences for its business customer segment. The utility tapped FirstFuel to enhance its understanding of customers and engage them with customized recommendations based on their needs and circumstances.
“We face the same challenges as a lot of businesses – customers are more sophisticated, more informed and looking beyond price to value-sharing technology and energy efficiency solutions,” said Jim Dollard, executive director, Electric Ireland. “Customers are at the heart of what we do at Electric Ireland so it’s in our DNA to proactively meet these changing customer needs. FirstFuel helps us get critical insights about our SME customers so we understand what they are doing now, what they want to do and how we can help them get there.”
With the new client additions and expansions of prior deployments, FirstFuel now manages data from nearly six million business electric and gas meters across North America and Europe. In the past year, FirstFuel’s outstanding work for utilities has been recognized by award programs including Energy Manager Today Product and Project Awards (Project of the Year: Baltimore Gas & Electric), Global Cleantech 100, and CS Week’s Expanding Excellence Awards (Innovation on Digital Customer Engagement: Exelon; Best Analytics Project: Baltimore Gas & Electric).
Partnerships Bring FirstFuel Intelligence to Key Utility Systems
In
2017, FirstFuel announced that its products would be available on the Salesforce
AppExchange and signed its first Salesforce AppExchange client
contract.
FirstFuel also continued its partnership with Oracle, a global leader in utility customer software. FirstFuel and Oracle share more than a dozen joint customers, having added several new utilities and expanded existing client relationships in 2017. The combined Oracle-FirstFuel end-to-end engagement solutions across both residential and business customers is widely considered to be the industry standard for the emerging class of customer engagement software.
“As we continue to expand the reach of our platform to help utilities best engage their business customers, our partners will be integral to our success,” said Swap Shah, co-founder and CEO, FirstFuel. “Their ability to connect intelligence and business customer engagement to complementary and core systems is game-changing for utilities looking to maximize ROI.”
As FirstFuel charts its course for the next 12 months and beyond, it will look to newly appointed strategic adviser, Anthony Ross, for guidance. Ross previously served as managing director for Accenture, where he held key leadership roles for nearly two decades. Ross specializes in utility customer care and brings more than 30 years of experience working as a consultant for gas, electric and water utilities in the U.S. and abroad.
“FirstFuel is bringing great innovation to a historically conservative industry,” said Ross. “I am honored to help the company push forward and bring its advanced platform to more and more utilities worldwide.”
About FirstFuel Software
FirstFuel Software is the global
leader in business customer engagement for utilities, using advanced
analytics to help 30 energy providers in North America and Europe
improve business customer satisfaction, drive sales and revenue and
reduce service costs. Combining data science, building science and
software, our business customer engagement platform derives intelligence
to nearly six million meters, transforming energy providers into trusted
advisers to their business customers. Our SaaS solutions deliver
accurate, insightful and cost-effective results at scale. Founded in
2010 and privately held, FirstFuel is headquartered in Lexington, MA.
For more information about FirstFuel, please visit www.firstfuel.com
and follow us on Twitter @FirstFuelSW.
