How blockchain can help utilities improve their reputation and engagement with customers

It’s no secret that for decades, electricity utilities around the world have been struggling to improve their reputation with residential and commercial customers. For one example, a 2013 survey focused on the UK found that nearly two-thirds (!) of consumers thought utility companies had a bad reputation. Only banking had a worse reputation. Across the Atlantic, a PowerGrid International article similarly headlined, “The Reputation Imperative: Why North American Utilities Still Don’t Get It.”

I’m not here to debate whether most utilities actually deserve a less-than-stellar reputation. (Around much of the world, they do a remarkably good job of keeping the lights on for prices that are quite affordable when you step back and think about it. Many consumers spend as much or more per month on a data plan for their cellular phone than they do on their electric bill.)

Instead, as a marketing and communications professional, I’m personally more concerned with the mantra of “perception equals reality.” In today’s era of customer retail energy choice, growing customer investment in myriad cost-effective technology options for behind-the-meter distributed energy resources (DERs), and so-called grid defection scenarios, utilities’ reputation issues are not mere brand vanity. They converge with matters such as business strategy, customer loyalty, and the “utility of the future.”

Three ways customers’ expectations of utilities are shifting

Although the utility reputation issue isn’t new, there are recent shifts in what customers expect from their utility and what issues influence their perception of a company such as their local grid operator.

1. Data privacy: Consumer trust in large technology companies like Facebook and Google is at an all-time low. A significant contributor to the vote of no confidence stems from wave after wave of major data breaches, in which the personal information of tens of millions of customers is accessed by hackers. (A close second is how tech companies use the customer data they have on you.) But it’s one thing for a hacker to compromise some photos you’ve voluntarily shared on social media; it’s quite another thing for your energy use and billing data to get leaked (which in turn could be used to understand when you’re likely home and when you’re not, for just one example).
2. Personalized (green) choice: From major companies demanding green tariffs and other options for procuring 100% renewable energy, to residential customers investing in low-carbon DERs such as solar PV and electric vehicles, choice and empowerment are two words I expect will remain in utilities’ lexicon for some time. Throughout the marketing world, in recent years there’s been much talk about how the future of marketing is about treating each customer as a “segment of one.” This is the antithesis of the old utility approach of lumping thousands or even millions of customers into a few blunt groups. And this is why a Bain & Company editorial talked about “delighting the customer behind the meter” and earning their loyalty.
3. Online, digital experience: Finally, for better or worse, today’s utility customers are utterly immersed in an online, digital experience against which utilities are inevitably compared. Allow me to quote from the introduction of Customer Engagement in an Era of Energy Transformation, published by the global power and utilities division of PwC: “The online experiences customers are becoming used to in areas such as retailing, travel and media are setting a new norm, raising the standards expected for baseline aspects of a utility’s operations such as metering, billing, payment and outages.”

Leveraging blockchain-based solutions to bolster customer engagement

Of course, utilities are not powerless to manage and improve their own reputations and bolster their reputation, loyalty, and engagement with their customers. In fact, overall utility reputations have been making incremental advances of late. However, the reputational gap between the highest- and lowest-ranked utilities is now the largest it’s been in 13 years, according to a November 2019 electric utility customer satisfaction survey from J.D. Power, suggesting that progressive utilities are starting to make some of the right moves, while laggards are now at more risk than ever of losing their customer base.

So what does blockchain have to do with any of this?

For starters, blockchain has an important role to play in utilities’ digitalization of their operations—and especially the services and experiences they ultimately deliver to customers. The EW Origin SDK, for example, streamlines renewable energy markets, expands choice, and makes more consistent the UX across geographies. In other words, it makes renewable energy markets look and act a lot more like the online experience of searching for flights, hotels, or rental cars that so many customers are familiar with. This strikes right at the core of PwC’s perspective on how online experiences are raising the standards of customer expectations of utilities.

But perhaps even more profoundly, a blockchain-based approach to DERs—such as that EWF has undertaken with Austrian Power Grid—uses decentralized identifiers and the concept of self-sovereign identity to return some symmetry to the often one-sided utility-customer relationship. It makes the future grid a partnership of traditional poles and wires on one hand and millions of customer-sited DER “endpoints” on the other hand. It re-aligns the relationship to be one that happens on terms mutually acceptable to both parties. And crucially, it avoids the private silo approach in which a single big tech company stores hordes of sensitive customer data.

Divesting some of that “control” and choice to their customers may be one of the smartest reputational decisions a utility can make. And the true irony of such a strategic decision could very well be that blockchain—so often described as a “trustless” architecture—may in the end boost customers’ trust in the very utilities of which they’ve become so skeptical. With trust, comes loyalty; and with loyalty, comes reputation.