Each year E Source celebrates utilities that are creating excellent experiences for their customers and providing a supportive workplace for their employees with the E Source Achievements in Customer and Employee Experience. We also recognize and celebrate the work smaller utilities do to provide quality experiences to their customers and award our top-scoring utility website in the E Source 2026 Website Benchmark.
We’re thrilled to share this year’s honorees along with a look at the presentations given earlier this month at E Source Forum 2026.
The E Source 2026 utility awards winners
Residential customer experience achievements
This award celebrates utility excellence in residential customer experience (CX) management, highlighting tactics and programs that enhance customers’ experiences.
We’re excited to celebrate PG&E and Austin Energy this year.
PG&E
PG&E is the winner of the 2026 Achievement in Customer Experience for its Second Line Support program. Second Line Support is a cross-functional, real-time support model that helps contact center representatives resolve complex customer issues during the first call so they don’t have to create a case.
The program connects phone reps with experts from other utility departments like gas, electric, or vegetation management. This “phone-a-friend” model gives frontline coworkers answers in the moment. As a result, customers experience quicker solutions and fewer handoffs.
Winner of the 2026 Achievement in Customer Experience
As a result of this customer-centric approach:
- About 65% of Second Line Support consultations resolved customer issues without creating a case.
- In 2025, even though the program operated for only part of the year, it helped the utility avoid more than 1,800 customer cases.
- Between September and December 2025, the program contributed to a 12% reduction in support cases.
One of our judges noted:
Not only does this result in better customer service, but it reduces repeat calls … and connects more non-customer-facing employees to the day-to-day realities of their customers. I love a solution that’s almost entirely people-powered!
Austin Energy
The runner-up for the 2026 Achievement in Customer Experience is Austin Energy for its Community Affordability and Engagement Ecosystem. This coordinated, multisector design brings several programs together, including:
- Community Connections Resource Fair. An annual event that connects residents with utility programs and dozens of social service providers.
- Affordable Energy Summit. An event that brings together local, state, and national researchers, policymakers, advocates, and local community partners to focus on affordability innovation.
- Plus 1 Financial Assistance Network. A partner-driven crisis intervention program that delivered $2.6 million in assistance to 8,954 households in 2025.
- Utility Education Programs. Programs that helped participants reduce their electric bills by an average of $45 per month.
- Emergency Preparedness Outreach. Proactive communication and preparedness support for medically vulnerable households, renters, seniors, and underserved communities.
- Community Partnership Network. A cross-sector network of 61 active community partners and about 50 City of Austin departments collaborating on affordability, resilience, and customer support.
These support initiatives show strong, measurable improvements in engagement, health and safety outcomes, and household stability.
One of our judges noted:
This approach of integrating affordability assistance, emergency preparedness, partnerships, and direct outreach with communities seems well-executed and more expansive than often is the case.
Business customer experience achievements
This award celebrates utility excellence in business customer experience. Business customers have unique and varied energy needs that require creative solutions.
We’re excited to celebrate BGE and Exelon Corp. (Exelon) this year.
BGE
BGE is the winner of the 2026 Achievement in Business Customer Experience for its Environmental Justice Outreach Initiative. For this initiative, BGE used an interactive Environmental Justice map tool to identify communities historically left out of commercial energy efficiency markets.
BGE’s Commercial Outreach Team went into those communities to build trust with businesses at:
- Community meetings
- Faith-based gatherings
- Small business roundtables
- Neighborhood events
This outreach initiative made sure energy efficiency incentives went to schools, churches, and nonprofits with fixed budgets. For these businesses, energy funds often compete with classroom resources, social services, and payroll.
Winner of the 2026 Achievement in Business Customer Experience
Our judges loved how the initiative repositioned BGE from a program administrator to community partner.
An E Source judge noted:
This is a very important project that builds stronger communities and supports energy equity.
In total, BGE gave $195,000 in incentives to environmental justice customers. The total verified energy savings from this program were 571.96 metric tons of avoided carbon dioxide (CO2).
Exelon
The runner-up for the 2026 Achievement in Business Customer Experience is Exelon for its Manage My Account product. The Manage My Account product is a custom-built dashboard designed specifically for large commercial customers who manage multiple utility accounts.
Key features of the modern, comprehensive interface include:
- A mobile-first and accessibility-forward approach to design and usability
- A “Billing Summary” card that gives customers with multiple accounts a snapshot of total amounts owed across all billing groups
- An enhanced “Billing Details” page that breaks down bills for individual accounts
- A portfolio-level view for billing, outage, and usage information, so customers get a comprehensive picture of their entire account portfolio
One of our judges said:
This enhanced website experience addresses a long-standing problem that plagues most utilities. Often websites fully cater to residential customers leaving businesses behind and frustrated with the self-service options available to them.
The Manage My Account product empowers large commercial customers to self-serve, manage their energy use, and explore program options. It also frees up the time account managers spent helping large customers with their multiple utility accounts.
Employee experience achievements
The Achievement in Employee Experience Award celebrates innovative methods in employee engagement that result in increased employee satisfaction. It highlights organizations that work hard to encourage, enable, educate, empower, and reward employees. The better the employee experience is at a utility, the better its customer experience will be too.
We’re excited to celebrate Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) and Con Edison this year.
MLGW
MLGW is the winner of the 2026 Achievement in Employee Experience for its Customer Experience and Energy Services Transformation Program. MLGW launched this program to improve company culture, enhance customer service, strengthen leadership, and create workforce development opportunities within the community.
MLGW took a people-centered approach with this program. It included:
- Employee listening sessions led by utility leadership
- Modernized leadership roles, like splitting the Section Supervisor role into Customer Experience Supervisor I and Customer Experience Supervisor II positions
- Clear career pathways for employees with opportunities for advancement, mentoring, and ongoing professional growth
MLGW also created the Customer Experience and Energy Services Academy to strengthen the utility industry’s future talent pipeline and create job opportunities for underserved areas of its community. In partnership with Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Southwest Tennessee Community College, and MLGW Human Resources, the academy recruits high school students from underserved communities and prepares them for careers in the utility industry.
Winner of the 2026 Achievement in Employee Experience
MLGW saw dramatic outcomes because of these initiatives:
- Call abandonment rates decreased from about 40% to less than 1%
- Customer satisfaction increased to 95%
- Employee attrition decreased from about 40% to 10%
- 20 students attended the Customer Experience and Energy Services Academy, and MLGW hired 10 of them into utility positions
One of our judges noted:
Important program, especially as AI threatens talent pipelines by reducing entry-level positions. This work showed excellent impacts on both the customer and employee, as well as a strong commitment to bettering employment opportunities throughout the Memphis area.
Con Edison
The runner-up for the 2026 Achievement in Employee Experience is Con Edison for its Strategic Applications team. The Strategic Applications team helped Con Edison deploy an AI search tool so employees could more easily find information in the utility’s knowledge management system.
In 2023, Con Edison launched Oracle Knowledge Advanced, a cloud-based knowledge management system housing its policies, procedures, training materials, and reference content. While it was an improvement over Microsoft SharePoint, contact center reps found it hard to use the keyword search to get information they needed during customer calls.
The Strategic Applications team was a cross-functional group that used expertise from customer operations, IT, and other departments to pioneer an AI search experience. This group designed the AI search to live within the Oracle Knowledge Advanced platform instead of introducing a new system, chatbot, or stand-alone tool.
An E Source judge said:
This is one of the more beneficial AI use cases I think utilities can go after. Using AI to enhance the talents of their people shows how AI can serve as a valuable internal tool that empowers employees to do better by customers.
Through the introduction of the AI search tool, Con Edison saw big results:
- For users who adopted the AI tool, the average time they spent searching for answers decreased by 1.66 minutes
- AI-assisted interactions increased successful call resolution rates from 62% to 77%
- 79% of AI-assisted calls resolved without supervisor escalation
Small utility achievements
The Small Utility Excellence Award honors the achievements of smaller utilities, where smaller teams and budgets can present big challenges for customer and employee experience initiatives.
We’re excited to celebrate Newfoundland Power this year for two of its recent initiatives: its High Bill Working Group and its SHIFT program.
Newfoundland Power
High Bill Working Group. In the winter of 2025, Newfoundland Power noticed a shift in customer sentiment. Between an especially cold winter and electricity rate increases, the small utility’s contact center got a 130% increase in calls related to winter bills.
In response, Newfoundland Power created the High Bill Working Group. The group worked throughout the spring and summer to make sure employees and customers were ready for the next winter bill season.
The High Bill Working Group:
- Created internal, customer-first training for employees across all departments
- Revised content on the utility’s website about high bills to include more visuals and to make sure content was readable at a sixth-grade reading level
- Created a special 18-month Equal Payment Plan option for low-income customers, removing restrictions on rolling in arrears in certain situations
As a result of the High Bill Working Group’s changes, the utility saw an increase in customer program participation and a decrease in customer arrears. Participation in the Equal Payment Plan increased by 16% and as of May 2026, there were 25% fewer customers with balances due over 90 days.
Winner of the 2026 Small Utility Excellence Award
SHIFT program. The utility’s SHIFT program is a yearlong leadership development initiative that gives employees the skills, confidence, and support they need to improve how they work and improve utility operations. Employees in the SHIFT program serve as innovation ambassadors for one year.
During their year as ambassadors, employees work on teams with people from other areas of the organization. These teams work together to design practical solutions to customer and operational issues.
Ambassadors also participate in a series of professional and personal development workshops called the SHIFT Speaker and Training Series. The year culminates in formal pitch-style presentations to senior leadership, where teams present their ideas, business cases, and next steps.
Website Benchmark Award of Excellence
We also presented an award at Forum based on our annual Website Benchmark, an independent study that scores utility websites on accessibility, findability, functionality, content, and appearance. For our 2026 study, we looked at the secure side of utility websites including key features like “My Account,” “My Energy Use,” and “Account Preferences.”
To view the full list of the 2026 Website Benchmark scores, read our press release Utility websites are improving usability behind the login, E Source study finds.
PG&E received the Website Benchmark Award of Excellence for 2026 because its website ranked highest overall in our study. PG&E had strong performance across desktop and mobile experiences.
Winner of the 2026 Website Benchmark Award of Excellence
PG&E’s “My Account” page had intuitive navigation with robust functionality and content. It included the basics like notification settings, payment information, usage insights, and account settings. But it also went above and beyond with:
- A clean and uncluttered design
- The ability to view multiple accounts from one My Account portal
- The ability to stream my data
- The ability to share my data
- Personalized outage information
- Service request information
Browse more on related topics
About the author
