Additionally, we conduct a tracker among customers — both business and residential — who reach out to a call center because of discrete power interruptions.
For two reasons, these interactions can have significant downstream consequences for perceptions of utilities through measurements like the JD Power index for that category.
Many power companies offer additional value-added services beyond generation and transmission of energy. Many of those who don’t are considering doing so.
Through sophisticated discrete choice modeling, DDG helps our utility customers predict adoption of different products. Our research considers the fact that unlike electric power, consumers have choices when it comes to things like:
Home security options
Home automation systems
Home appliance warranties
Utilities maintain a wealth of data about their customers’ kWh usage, billing rates, and other metrics specifically related to power usage. Appending decisionPointsTM data to customers’ data in an analytics data mart unlocks additional attributes about utility customers that are not typically considered in analysis. These additional variables — up to 800 of them — can be used for additional analysis on surveys, usage cohorts, and many other analytic applications.
For many years, DDG has built and maintained custom, opt-in panels of both residential and commercial utility customers on behalf of our power company clients. These panels range from a few thousand to many tens of thousands of research panelists. The utilities have found that with DDG’s custom panel approach, they are able to conduct exponentially more research than through traditional sampling methods using external sample vendors.
In addition, the panels serve as another important touchpoint for utility customers. In this case, consumers realize that the power company is listening to them, and their panel membership represents their chance to count.
