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.

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.

What are utilities doing to plan for the wants and needs of their future customers? To help answer this question, E Source is holding its annual Executive Roundtable for Customer Innovation in Boston on April 16, 2019. This meeting for the executive leadership of utilities’ customer-facing departments provides participants with the opportunity to hold frank, closed-door discussions with their peers.

Did you know that US households, on average, pay about 13 bills per month? And because e-billing is growing as a billing and payment option, consumers have more online accounts, cards, alerts, and notices to track than ever before. And when you consider the paper bills many customers still receive, you’re seeing a web of channels, choices, and options customers can choose from to make payments.