It seems intuitive that increasing administration efficiencies through automation would be a great benefit when it comes to delivering and implementing Energy Efficiency programs.  Particularly when more efficient administration is successful in driving a more streamlined customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction and JD Power scores, and lowering costs and human error. For these reasons, the private sector has been using digitization and automation so robustly that customers have come to expect a certain level of digitized automation as a baseline.

So why are utilities so reticent to adopt this tried-and-tested form of innovation? The primary reason seems to be caution around not wanting to up-end what they know works well enough. Another common reason is the challenge of measuring if they are getting proper return on their investment in automation.

Although there is no magic formula to completely eliminate risk inherent with new processes – utilities successful in implementing administrative automation and digitization tend to understand three fundamental truths:

1. Digitization is not a trend, it is a necessity.

2. Automation and digitization should be used to optimize the business in incrementally small ways, and expanded over time

3. To ensure employee buy-in, automation and digitization should not be a ‘rip and replace’ strategy

Forbes reports that intelligent automation implementation can result in cost savings of 40-75%, with the payback period for initial investments being several months to several years.

The best way to start including automation and digitization in the business is to run a pilot that includes basic automation that can offer easily viewable ‘wins’. The key is to identify an area of change that will have a low failure rate, for a relatively niche part of the business. Specifically, for many utilities, this area of change can be ‘program application adjudication’. There are very limited downsides to being able to process more applications in less time with fewer incidents of human error. The downside here is that employee roles may need to be reviewed because what had been consuming 15 hours per week now only consumes 3 hours because the manual efforts are removed or reduced by automation. 

If that application adjudication  is harder to amend in your organization, another option for implementing automation, at a less operational level, is using enhanced automation to facilitate customer targeting and segmentation. This kind of digitized automation scans utility data, often assisted by public data, to provide actionable insights which can be used to automate targeted marketing or outbound campaigns. Lead generation achieved through automation, rather than manually combing through customer usage files, trying to find correlations and insights at an aggregate and service-territory level, typically results in less bias, less human error, and certainly less time spent setup campaigns.  In this example, time saved by human resources can be put to better use in areas such as campaign design, stakeholder alignment, and KPI identification and tracking.

There has never been a better time to adopt digitization and automation. Utilities need to move quickly and have a strategy to avoid falling behind others, and finding themselves backed into a corner where they are unable to meet basic customer expectations.  Through careful adoption of automation, utilities can avoid risks to their current business and create time and space for processes that require a human touch.

Learn more about how digitization and automation can help make the utility business, and energy efficiency programs in specific, more efficient.