This E Source market research study provides utilities with critical customer insights as they consider changes to residential rate structures and pricing options. It delivers detailed data and segment-level information on customers' knowledge of and willingness to accept various rate structures; opinions on solar incentives and net metering; and interest in certain behind-the-meter technologies and associated pricing options.

Host Bryan Jungers, director of mobility at E Source, talks with Laura Beavin-Yates, vice president of customer success for Immersion Neuroscience, and Rachel Cooper, director of E Source Market Research, to learn about a collaboration between Immersion Neuroscience and E Source that produced some exciting and useful results.

At E Source, we talk to demand-side management (DSM) industry professionals every day about the work they’re doing and the challenges they face on the job. Two common sentiments that we often hear from DSM program managers and execs about performance are:

Empathy helps get rid of biases we often apply to data to add context, like personal experiences, confirmation bias, and expertise bias. It can help predict how customers will react to your offerings because you know what their personal experiences are. If you spend time with your customers, sharing their experiences, you’ll get a better-informed version of the truth—their truth, not yours.

Have you ever brought a new idea to your utility only to run into these responses?

• Our legacy system prevents us from doing that
• We tried that XXX years ago, and it didn’t work
• But we’ve always done it this way
• Regulators would never approve that

If these responses sound familiar, that’s because these are some of the barriers that your utility peers wrote on the Wall of Excuses at the most recent E Source E Design 2020 conference: Powering What’s Next for the New Energy Consumer.

Every new technology must cross the “chasm of death”—the high-risk, precommercial phase of market adoption where costs are high and value is uncertain—before it can take off and penetrate the market at scale. Utilities test and promote emerging technologies, but these efforts often only address technical and market potential, not market development.

Through E Source’s recent residential ethnographic research for “E Design 2020”, we identified discrepancies between the bills utilities send to their customers and the information customers want. Most bill redesigns focus on making it clear how much customers owe, reformatting for readability, adding elements of interest such as recent bill amounts and comparisons, and describing line items on the bill. But that’s not always enough.