Refined Customer Experience

Overview

A major U.S. electrical and gas utility operates New England’s largest utility system, serving more than 3.6 million customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Renowned for its excellence in energy efficiency, the utility company deployed C3 AI Customer Engagement Application to its residential and commercial customers across all six of their operating utilities to provide a comprehensive platform for engagement, information, and efficiency efforts.

Built on the C3 Agentic AI Platform, the applications allow the utility company to view and report on customer data across its utilities for the first time, enabling the company to achieve energy efficiency goals. By providing customers with highly targeted insights and information, the utility company provides its customers with highly targeted insights and information about their energy use, tailored recommendations for saving energy, and details on available rebates to help them meet their energy savings goals.

About the Utility Company

• 3.6M Electric and Gas Customers
• 3 States served: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire
• 6 Major utility operating companies
• $180M Customer savings from energy efficiency initiatives in 2014
• 828GW Hours saved annually through energy efficiency programs

Project Highlights

• 5 C3 AI Customer Engagement Applications
• 3.3M Residential Users
• 12 Unique Source Systems

The utility company is a leader in customer engagement and energy efficiency. In 2016, Ceres ranked the company first in energy efficiency among investor-owned utilities. The 2017 American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Utility Energy Efficiency Scorecard ranked the company in Massachusetts first and in Connecticut fourth among the 51 largest U.S. electric utilities.

The company’s vision for a comprehensive, common customer engagement platform included being able to cost-effectively decrease energy use through even greater customer engagement. The platform plan focused on delivering an end-to-end, targeted customer experience that would make basic transactions simple and more efficient online or with a mobile device. It was vital that the company be able to deliver personalized energy efficiency insights to each customer—tailored to the customer type, segment, and operating utility—while still providing a consistent user experience across all customers and utilities.

The company selected the C3 Agentic AI Platform and deployed it in 2015 to provide a compelling self-service experience that gives 4 million customers increased transparency, simplicity, and control. C3 AI aggregates data from 12 disparate source systems into a single, federated data image, enabling the company to view, analyze, and report on energy trends and customer engagement opportunities across operating utilities. C3 AI provides customers a single view to all efficiency programs, including energy audits and energy efficiency rebates, enabling customers to quickly implement energy measures through one, unified interface.

The company managers use C3 AI Customer Engagement and C3 AI Intelligence to access and report on customer data. C3 AI Customer Engagement combines data from the company’s systems with external third-party data sources to develop robust customer segmentation definitions and then assign customers to those segments based on unique, data-driven profiles. This enables the company to drive customer engagement, increase participation in energy efficiency programs, and personalize customer interactions. The company uses C3 AI Intelligence to create ad-hoc reports, explore customer data through an intuitive dashboard, and discover and share actionable insights across operating utilities.