Do Energy Customers Trust You? We Have the Data.

[00:00:07.770] - Jen Szaro
Welcome back to Energy Beat Podcast. I'm Jen Zaro, CEO of AESP, and I'm here today at our annual conference in the Big Easy, mixing it up with our AESP members. Today I'm lucky enough to score a few minutes with Dan Burex with Uplight, and he's super excited to talk with me about the unique opportunities utilities have to move the needle of clean energy, and he has the data to back it up. So Dan, welcome to the show. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your role at Uplight.

[00:00:38.820] - Dan Burak
Hey Jen, happy to be here. I'm dan burek with uplight. My official title is Senior Director of Brand Marketing. My responsibility within the organization is to really help hone our message to all of our audiences, not just utilities, but also the broader sort of ecosystem of players that are out there. Analysts, journalists, and other potential partners. And I've been with Uplight for about a year and a half, so I'm relatively new and frankly, relatively new to the industry as well.

[00:01:06.080] - Jen Szaro
Great. And Uplight is a unique model. I mean, it seems like you're really an ecosystem and a connector of parts of that energy ecosystem. So tell me a little bit more about how all those pieces fit together and how you work with utilities and other partners.

[00:01:22.450] - Dan Burak
Sure thing. So we define ourselves as a grid edge customer engagement, enrollment and load flexibility platform for energy utilities. But what it means is we actually create these end to end experiences for utility customers. And that starts with anything of just being more aware of your energy use and how you might change it to then sort of having them take some sort of an action, whether that be buying a smart thermostat through. A marketplace or maybe an EV charger or something like that and enrolling in programs that then help them save money and source maybe cleaner energy as well through a rate program or something like that. So as the ecosystem expands, our goal, what we want to do, our vision, is kind of to become this grid edge operating system and being able to be that connector across all these ecosystem players that are coming into this space faster and faster, which kind of was the impetus for the study to begin with.

[00:02:14.270] - Jen Szaro
Wow, that's really fascinating and quite needed, honestly, based on the customer journey today and all the new players that we're seeing in the market.

[00:02:23.170] - Dan Burak
Yeah, I come from the branding and advertising industry into the energy industry. So how products and brands position themselves and launch into the marketplace successfully or not, is what I've been doing for a long time, so I'm excited to bring that to this space.

[00:02:39.600] - Jen Szaro
Speaking of the industry, just recently Uplight released some amazing data that you pulled together with the Sea Change Institute showcasing how consumers evaluate brands and which brands and products and services they'll allow into their homes to help them manage their energy decisions as all of these additional companies are entering the clean energy ecosystem. So within that data, as I understand it, revealed that retailers like Walmart, Costco and Target, along with even Ford, have the biggest barrier to overcome in terms of being viewed as a fit, as a partner with utilities to reduce energy costs. So instead, consumers ranked utilities pretty high on the willingness to connect and manage their home's energy use. So tell me a little bit more about the study and your findings.

[00:03:27.530] - Dan Burak
Sure, yes. We partnered with Sea Change. They're awesome, by the way, and they have this deep experience in the energy space. It was kind of this nice marriage of me coming from an advertising and branding background and having this really keen interest in understanding how all these different players are going to fit in consumers lives and then see change with this deep utility and energy experience. When I first joined, I was noticing there were all these conversations happening not just at Uplight, but at other places as well about this clean energy ecosystem. Right. And there's a lot of factors that are driving new players to enter this space. And everybody knows this story, right? Renewables on the supply side are creating more volatility in the supply, which then translates all the way through to more volatility at the grid edge, which then leads to us wanting more electrification and more ability to sort of flex load. Right? And that's why Uplight exists as well. There's kind of this direct line now then into opportunity in all these players coming into the space, some of them very expected technology companies, some of them a little bit less expected, like maybe retailers.

[00:04:28.130] - Dan Burak
There's certainly car companies and there's categories of products like smart thermostats and smart speakers and things like that. And your HVAC is in your house. So what we did is we wanted to think about a couple of things. A who's coming and what categories are those in and what does that look like? And B how are Energy customers going to evaluate those newcomers, not just in this new space, but then in the context of these new players? And how are they going to make decisions about who they let into their lives?

[00:04:56.240] - Jen Szaro
And how do utilities rank in that? We heard they ranked high, but from what you were saying, it's multiple factors that they're really considering for how they're evaluating who to work with right. Regarding energy decisions. So what were the differences in how utilities rank compared with some of the other companies and what are sort of the key takeaways related to that?

[00:05:17.800] - Dan Burak
Sure, nobody sailed through. First of all, yes, utilities definitely ranked high in some really good and surprising ways, as did others, but nobody was like, okay, rock on, we're going all the way through and you're just going to be a part of these energy customers lives. Instantly. We looked at five dimensions and the order of them is sort of important because the first few are how consumers or energy customers might evaluate any new product coming into their lives. We looked at a dimension called Trust, which is do you trust this brand or service to do the right thing? We looked at competence. Do you think they're good at what they do today? Right. And then, because they're entering a new space, we looked at innovation, meaning can they do new things? You have this good sort of feel for what that looks like and these are dimensions that they're using to evaluate all the time. Right? Then we had a couple of dimensions that are specific to this clean energy ecosystem space that we're talking about. We asked them their willingness to have these brands or products or services connect their home to make it what one might call a smart home or a grid interactive home.

[00:06:22.400] - Dan Burak
We used smart home as a terminology and then last it all led to this which brands, products or services would you be most willing to let you manage some of your energy decisions? And so we did call initially and sort of got those dimensions figured out and understood the questions we wanted to ask. And then we actually did a national quantitative study over 2400 respondents across all demographics and geographies, and we had them rank a little slider on their screen for each brand of how they do across those different dimensions. That's sort of the brief methodology of how it went. Right, so nobody just scored high all the way through and there were just fascinating differences depending on who it wasn't. So electric utilities were in there. We asked them to tell us who their electric utility was. Cell phone providers, internet providers for this notion of broadband, smart, thermostats smart speakers, Solar, HVAC, and then a bunch of actual brands that whether or not they're actually entering the category. We wanted to get creative here. Companies like apple, google, tesla, amazon, microsoft, costco, ford and walmart. So 16 in total that we had them rank across all these different dimensions.

[00:07:26.470] - Jen Szaro
And how did utilities score on the innovation dimension?

[00:07:31.810] - Dan Burak
Yeah, so when I said no one sailed through, that's probably their Achilles heel, right? Which maybe won't come as a huge surprise. Utilities did surprisingly well with trust. They were actually sort of the top third. And I used to work with the cable industry and those folks weren't going to do as well as that and I was sort of expecting maybe some of that to come through here. But it was surprisingly well on the trust factor. Their lowest factor by far was in innovation. And I think everyone talks about the level of engagement that utilities are trying to increase with their energy customers. We've still got work to do there for sure.

[00:08:03.790] - Jen Szaro
Yeah. I don't feel like marketing has ever been the number one priority for the utility sector, although I do see that greatly shifting, obviously, ASP that's a huge focus for us is getting to be more customer centric and understanding that relationship with the customer. I'm not surprised to hear that utilities work well on the trust factor because I do think that they've been around. They have an ongoing monthly relationship with the customer, and they're the ones they have to call when there's outages and maybe how well they do their job there could be. I'm curious to hear how they did there, but I do believe that utilities are sort of used to being that trusted advisor for the most part for customers. But given that they aren't maybe considered great innovators by their customers, what could they be doing differently to overcome that? Should they be maybe partnering with some of the ones that scored more as high innovators? Is that an option for them? Do you think that's a good option for them?

[00:09:13.570] - Dan Burak
I think it's a great option for them. That's one of the entire core principles of this clean energy ecosystem, right, is that there's players, some are more central, some are sort of more on the periphery. We want to be the sort of grid edge OS that is that connective tissue amongst all of these. But at the same time we see utilities as having the best opportunity to transform the grid to clean energy, right? Because they have the biggest levers and they have this amazing gift of this sort of conversation that they're having on a regular basis with energy customers where they may have a dip in being perceived as innovative. Other entities that were in our study that scored very high had themes of being digital first. So I use this phrase like just add smart to anything and you're going to do pretty well in being perceived as being innovative. We have lessons we can take away of being a smart grid, et cetera.

[00:20:00.050] - Speaker 1
The Amazons and Googles and Apples of the world that are sort of digitally native were scored very, very high on innovation, but maybe they scored less high on some of these other factors. So some of these same entities, when it came to helping me manage and make some of my energy decisions, if these entities didn't have what we call a close mental proximity to energy, in other words, if they have nothing to do with energy in these energy customers mind, they scored quite low in that dimension. Whereas electric utilities actually did the best on that, as well as other close mental proximity entities like HVAC and Solar and Smart. Thermostats all of those did quite well there. But again, if utilities scored poorly on innovation, which they did, there's an opportunity to shore that up through partnerships. And what we found, we actually asked customers specifically, who is a good candidate to partner with your utility to give you either more affordable energy or cleaner energy? And the good news for utilities is that almost all of these other 15 entities scored quite well. More than half said, yeah, this kind of a good fit, or, It's a really good fit.

[00:21:05.330] - Speaker 1
There were a few that were not a good fit, that had probably the furthest mental proximity to energy. And those were like what are perceived as bricks and mortars retailers. So we had Target and Costco and Walmart in there, and their customers didn't give them permission to go there. They're like, no, that doesn't make sense for me, even with the utility as my partner, not so much. So they work to do.

[00:21:24.580] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I could see that. I mean, that's not my first thought. When I go to Target, I might grab a coffee at the inbuilt Starbucks on the way out, but I'm not really thinking about making an energy purchase related decision, or especially not an energy management decision at my local Target. But yeah, I actually do have Alexa currently turning my lights on and off at my house based on schedules. I see that I see that potential for connectivity with maybe some of these other organizations.

[00:21:53.780] - Speaker 1
That makes sense. And what was interesting as we walked across these dimensions, across trust, competence, innovation, and then connect and manage, is that if you think about it, they were structured in this order very much on purpose, because as you walk across them, the dimensions get more personal into energy customers life. So I can judge a brand from afar and say you're competent, or you're not competent, right, or you're innovative, or you're not innovative, trust starts to get a little bit more personal. Do I trust them right, to do the right thing? And that's how we do. You trust this brand or product to do the right thing. Then when it comes to connecting my home, suddenly I'm actually letting him into my life in some way, whether that be physically coming to my house to connect things or letting them in digitally to make my home, this smart home. And then when it comes to helping me manage my energy decisions, now you're affecting my wallet. Right now I'm handing over some control to my wallet. We actually found in aggregate that scores went down. You can almost see the stare drop going down as energy customers judged these brands and products and services across those different dimensions.

[00:22:59.000] - Speaker 1
But some had a much steeper drop at the end because they maybe were seen as competent or they maybe were seen as innovative. But if they didn't have that association of that mental proximity to energy, they had this massive drop of like, no, you got no business going back. Just like your profession.

[00:23:14.860] - Speaker 2
Right? Well that makes sense. But how do utilities really take advantage of those kinds of partnerships? I noticed one big challenge utilities often talk about is their inability to move quickly. So is there an advantage to working with these partners through partnerships to be able to move more quickly on some of these programs? What might that look like?

[00:23:38.240] - Speaker 1
Yeah, and certainly there's all sorts of complications and I'm not like a partnership m and a person. But having said that, there are some from a branding perspective, some just tried and true rules, right? Like partner up when you can. You want to partner up with someone that has brand equities that you aspire to, that you might be wanting to shore up and then be very complementary in how you think about that. Right. You can bring your strength to the table. They can bring their strength to the table and off you go. And as we saw, energy customers will give you credit and have a positive reaction when you combine those to a certain extent. Right. As long as you can make this intuitive sense of it. But that also is where branding and messaging come in. Right, so also utilities as well as these other folks, if you have a really distant sort of mental proximity to energy, you can work on that, right? It better be real, it better be authentic, there better be programs behind it, but maybe people just don't know about them. And so there's an opportunity certainly for education in this space overall, because we all know we're very nascent in this sort of space as far as grid edge and load flexibility and energy customers being more active and engaged in what they do.

[00:24:48.820] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I was thinking about that. In general, I would not say that most customers think about energy as much as we do, right. On a daily basis. They're not really maybe actively thinking about saving that next dollar or kilowatt hour. What is the entry point to make them a little more aware of what's happening with their energy usage? I think we were talking earlier about maybe using the electric vehicle as that entry point to help customers sort of understand and grasp the concept of saving energy and being engaged in their energy usage. Tell me about that idea of using electric vehicles as sort of that entry point.

[00:25:32.790] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Now this is just a theory, Jen. However, we've done annual voice of the customer surveys at Uplike and looking at their level of engagement with their utilities and it hasn't moved that much. Right. Engagement maybe a little bit around the edges and within our circle, even here at AESP, I think we're oftentimes thinking about that sort of early adopter or early majority, if you think about that classic bell curve and we sort of think that everyone else is just going to come along. Right. And we have a hope, I have a hope that that's the case. However, a lot of these grid edge devices are designed to sort of set it and forget it, right? Like even a Google nest is designed to put on your wall Smart thermostat. It learns your habits and it's actually designed then to engage with it less as you go on. Right. I think there's a general awareness that's increasing amongst energy consumers overall, just because you read about it in the news every day. Right. But what's going to be that tipping point? What's going to be that Trojan horse? So I think EVs is the closest thing that I can come up with because people love their cars and I use cars very purposely instead of electric vehicle.

[00:26:38.370] - Speaker 1
People just love their cars, especially Americans love their cars.

[00:26:42.240] - Speaker 2
We Americans love our cars.

[00:26:43.600] - Speaker 1
Yes, we do. If you were to picture like being an advertising person, right, if you picture two sort of full page ads, right, and one person sort of jumping up really happy in front of their brand new car, that's a pretty good ad. You would see that, right? You're not going to see them doing that exact same thing in front of their air conditioner. Right. Or in front of their Smart thermostat. There's just not that attachment. That's a Trojan horse. And they're going to be based on the car company's electrification goals as well as the D car goals. Those are coming off the line whether utilities are ready or not, right. That's sort of this known fact. So there's going to be this combining I was going to use the word collision, but I don't want to use that word, especially when it's cars of the cars and the utilities from an experience standpoint, because everybody knows and in even sort of the common language today, when we're talking about inflation, people talk about the price of gas. That's an indicator for every person to understand what is inflation like and what's the economy doing.

[00:27:42.650] - Speaker 1
And people don't understand, as we well know, how much energy costs or even how to measure or what even do I use to think about that, right? Well now, when it comes to my beloved car, and if that's my only choice or my majority of choices coming off the line, I'm going to get educated real fast. And so there's this massive opportunity from an experience standpoint, and it can go well or it could go poorly, but it's coming right on how to combine these two things.

[00:28:07.700] - Speaker 2
So funny. Yeah, because you think about gas prices quite a bit. If you're driving a gasoline powered vehicle, you're checking the price of the gas station, potentially pushing your empty car a little further to get that, save a few pennies, maybe even a gallon. But we are much more visually aware, I think, of energy and the volatility of gas prices, for instance, than we are for electricity prices, which don't seem to change in the customer's eye as rapidly, right. Or as severely. So I think that it seems to be one big challenge for us in building awareness and building engagement with customers and their home energy usage. Thinking about innovation, whose name comes first in these partnerships? Is it the innovative one or the one that we trust?

[00:29:01.030] - Speaker 1
You want them all right? Certainly if you can shore up through partnerships or on your own these dimensions. The ones that scored very well in innovation, as I said, were sort of these digital native or digital first sorts of companies. And trust, as we know, utilities did fairly well in that. And I think that is a direct result of this long relationship that they've had with energy customers and are doing very well at a lot of the things that they do. Right. Competence was this other notion where brands and products and services that were used every day had a much higher score in competence than others. So trust in competence, for example, in cell phone companies was pretty high and surprisingly so.

[00:29:43.170] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I'm surprised by that as well. And it's funny, I think we were talking about cell phones earlier, too. Cell phones. You're right. We used to really think about how many minutes we were spending on the phone and that would determine, based on the price per minute or the package that was available to you, which carrier you were willing to go with. And we see a little bit of that, I think, in the electric sector, especially in places like Texas, but we really don't see that across the country. And how does that market kind of relate to what we're seeing now in the energy sector, where people are more actively aware of smart devices and smart technologies? Is there a way to parlay that experience from the cell phone industry into what a consumer now experiences with electricity and smart devices?

[00:30:38.350] - Speaker 1
There's a lot of really interesting parallels there. Right. And I like that you said cell phone initially because used to be you would sign up, you pick your carrier and you would sign up for the plan that you thought was right for you. But then at the end of the month, sometimes there'd be a surprise in your bill, right? If you had maybe made an international call and forgotten about it or stayed on the phone too long. And so you'd have to manage that behavior, which is part of what we're talking about now, that's now transitioned kind of over. Almost everybody's on an unlimited data plan. Not homes there, but there's a large portion that are on an unlimited data plan or an unlimited talk plan and you just don't really think about it anymore. However, as that's transitioned into this world of smartphones, your phone is still with you all the time just for these slightly different purposes. Right? Like, there's a lot of folks that don't even use it to talk anymore, but they're doing it for other interactive things. When it comes to something like energy awareness, there's another potential entree rider, Georgian Horse, where I think it has to be something that you're using every day that ubiquity for that competence and what comes in from that standpoint.

[00:31:39.650] - Speaker 1
Everyone has too many apps on their phone. There's this massive saturation of too many apps, but there are aggregator apps and there are things that you're using every day that I'm hopeful that as the other ecosystem players come in, that they will sort of maybe latch on this home networking standard don't matter. Right suddenly now that might become an important sort of visiting place for your phone. And do we tap into that for certain audiences that are not going to become more energy aware?

[00:32:08.470] - Speaker 2
I think that could truly be a turning point for us because I've got to say, I was looking at my smartphone the other day and I have a whole section there full of apps that are all the different devices within my home that are being controlled digitally. And it's overwhelming so much for me. And I'm in the energy industry. I'm in the thick of it. I think about my mom and my dad trying to be part of this movement to be more aware and more active in managing their energy usage. And I just can't imagine them doing that with 19 different apps on their phone based on what they're trying to control or have an impact on. So where do you see the market headed with that? Where do you see utilities having a role in that with their partners potentially to kind of make that experience a better, more seamless experience for customers?

[00:33:07.090] - Speaker 1
Yeah, and that was really a lot of the inspiration even for this study. And it's a big reason why we chose known brands for the most part, right? Not that there isn't room in the market for a new brand, a new entrant that happens all the time, but as we know, they're so in, I think 2020 to one that your business is going to fail as you start up so piggybacking. And partnering, I think, is such a good, important strategy to think about, how am I going to we always call it, right? Meet customers where they are. But there are so many ways to do that. There's not just one way to do that, right? Because we're still in this very early adopter, earlymajority phase. How do we think about the segments that come after that? Using terms way beyond just energy customers, right? And we have some demographic, certainly segmentations that we do, but going way beyond that to psychographic and behavioral changes of how do we bring people in, what are they doing today? Is the Trojan horse the car? Is it this central app on the phone or what it might be?

[00:34:05.740] - Speaker 1
And how can utilities who have this wonderful advantage of this long history of a relationship with their energy customers leverage those and be more customer centric out there? That's a really sort of philosophical way to do it. And then, of course, the work is in the details to figure that out and become more customer consumer forward and how you're thinking about that.

[00:34:26.340] - Speaker 2
And I like how you're talking about the different segments, right? Because there are going to be those that maybe want to be more engaged in that energy management process. But my guess is there's probably lots of segments that, again, you need to meet them where they are and they need different things from you and they.

[00:34:44.390] - Speaker 1
May care about different parts of that energy footprint radically differently. Right? Like, I might care about my car a lot and probably don't care about my water heater much, right? My goodness, the conversation around gas dose versus electrification, right? So there's going to be these moments. I don't think it's all at once. I think it's different segments, different technologies, different devices, and different than connectivity tissue that brings it all along at different times for different people. The good news is that means there's not just one thing that can make it or break it. Right. The bad news is I don't think that journey is going to be as smooth as we all want it to be. It's not going to happen as quickly as we all want it to. That EV analogy that we've talked about, right? The cars are coming whether we want them to or not, and the opportunity again to make that a positive experience because there's so much emotion that people attach to their cars, myself included. People name their cars, right?

[00:35:40.140] - Speaker 2
I've got my lady boss.

[00:35:41.790] - Speaker 1
There you go. If you're an entrepreneur and a marketer and you have this sort of captive audience between being a utility customer and being in love with your car and those two are coming together, that's amazing.

[00:35:57.210] - Speaker 2
It really is. Well, I think you're onto something here for sure. I look forward to the day when utilities and their partners can create this folk energy management experience for the customer. I think that we might still need some help to get there, but I think we're making some really excellent progress. So thank you for sharing this data with us on this amazing findings. And I look forward to hearing more from you and from the folks at Uplike. Thanks for joining me today.

[00:36:28.240] - Speaker 1
Thank you. It was fun.

[00:36:29.300] - Speaker 2
That's it for today. Thank you for joining us.