Digital Utility
ENABLING THE DIGITAL ENERGY FUTURE TODAY WITH AVANGRID’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION
Every day we strive to address our customers’ energy needs while providing them with the care and service they expect and deserve. We’re also committed to providing our customers with resources and insights they need to reduce their environmental footprints and energy costs. These commitments include:
- Empowering our customers with digital tools to better manage their energy usage.
- Expanded program support to ensure we understand how our customers’ needs are growing and changing.
- New energy products and services to address theseevolving needs.
- Emergency response services to help our customers during critical events and situations.
To better understand our customers’ needs, we conducted a series of focus groups, in-depth interviews and Customer Listening Councils (initiated in 2021) to learn how they interact with the AVANGRID family of companies and how we can improve the customer experience based on our findings. In 2022 we’ve put these lessons into action. While we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, we will continue to engage with and listen to our customers so they can be active collaborators in our efforts to create a clean energy future.
DIGITAL TOOLS TO IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
In 2022, we launched several new digital tools designed to help our customers better understand and manage their energy usage. This includes Energy Manager, an energy management platform designed to provide our customers across New York with greater insights into their energy usage using data from our Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI, or “smart meter”) program. These smart meters are equipped with two-way communication to better collect and analyze energy consumption information. This information is used to help customers manage their energy usage and to help us reduce response times to outages while improving network reliability for our customers.
Strategic investments in technologies like AMI enable us to leverage data to improve decision-making so that we\ can increase value for our customers by helping reduce their energy demand and by better understanding their energy use.
In 2022, the Energy Manager project successfully completed a launch for 55,000 customers across New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG) and Rochester Gas and Electric (RG&E), with the remaining New York population set to launch in] early 2023. Additionally, the project created a new feature that allows customers to find products to reduce their consumption and stay in control of their bills. In 2023, the project will roll out to our CMP and UI residential and non-residential customers.
We also launched a new initiative in 2022 that automatically enrolls customers in power outage alerts, with 855,000 customers enrolled across Maine and New York. During outages, customers want to know how long they will be without power and when the power will come back on. These outage alerts enable us to keep our customers informed as we work to restore power.
To better understand how to serve our customers, we also launched our Net Promoter Score (NPS) digital tool, which enables customers to provide instant feedback via desktop or app regarding their experiences with us.
This means we can make changes based on customer feedback. Our apps (available across all our geographies) also empower our customers by allowing them to pay their bills with ease, access and view their accounts, update account information and easily engage with us.
Throughout 2022, our customers responded positively to these and other new digital tools. We saw this come to life through:
- Increased participation in our eBill (electronic billing program), which grew to 1.18 million customers, a 16.4% increase over 2021.
- Increased downloads of customer service apps (across our operating companies), which climbed to 840,000 – an increase of 73.3% over 2021.
- Nearly 1.4 million customers enrolled in power outage alerts, an increase of 265% over 2021.
