Suppose you are driving your car on a dark and curvy mountain road, on a rainy night, with a very foggy front windshield, dim headlights, and a perfectly clear rear view mirror to guide your path forward? It’s not a comforting scenario. Surprisingly, this is how many companies still operate when attempting to understand and improve their customers’ experiences and the resulting customer satisfaction (or JD Power/Net Promoter) ratings. They know a great deal about the past but very little about the future; they know a lot about the average customer but very little about the individual customer.

This will be the first in an occasional series about linking consumer databases to other, non-traditional data sources for deeper and innovative insights.  Today we pick on electric utilities.