Innovative Ways to Target Customers - Hydro Ottawa

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INNOVATIVE WAYS TO TARGET CUSTOMERS – HYDRO OTTAWA

• Hydro Ottawa is the third largest municipally owned electric utility in Ontario serving approximately 340,000 residential and commercial customers. Hydro Ottawa’s customer base grows at an average of 1% per year and currently has the second largest e-billing subscription rate among member utilities – 56%.

• Since 2015, Hydro Ottawa e-billing subscribership has witnessed an overall growth rate of 22% and falls under the top three fastest growing e-bill customer base over the last five years (average annual growth rate was about 4.5%, as per CEA’s data).

• Hydro Ottawa is partnering with core behavioural data-based companies like Environics. Behavioral

Economics (BE) is the scientific study of human behavior and offers powerful ways to create and measure change. Currently Environics and BE Works are two leading companies that are actively engaged withing the electricity sector, particularly in Ontario and are helping companies understand why people are hesitant to switch to e-bills and recommend new ways to approach this challenge.

Challenge

Hydro Ottawa has been employing targeted paperless campaigns for several years to convince customers to switch to electronic billing. Using promotions and incentives, the utility managed to convince 50% of their customers to switch to paperless. After following the same strategy for about 10 years they felt they were starting to plateau, they had about 50,000 MyAccount customers who had not enrolled in e-billing. The work Hydro Ottawa did to get to this point was remarkable considering paperless billing rates in the industry were commonly in the 30% range. Because the company was already well ahead of the industry benchmark, it knew it was going to have to work even harder to build on those numbers.

Solution

In 2018-2019 Hydro Ottawa commissioned Environics Research and Environics Analytics to design a new segmentation strategy rooted in psychographics and geo-demographic data. Their goal was to better understand who Hydro Ottawa’s customers were and what motivated them to adopt new products and services. By leveraging PRIZM5, Environics Analytics’ proprietary segmentation system and Social Values, jointly developed with Environics Research, which is a database that explains how an audience will respond to specific advertising and communications, Hydro Ottawa discovered it had seven distinct target groups. The segmentation approach showed that the early paperless adopters were higher income earners. While younger populations tend to favor technology more, age was not found to be a factor in who switched from their paper bills. The data showed that customers who lived in neighborhoods with greater access to technology and who were also comfortable using connected devices, were more likely to incorporate digital into other parts of their lives.

As a result, messages on visuals promoted in local campaigns were changed and this proved effective. By linking primary market research and third-party data analytics, Hydro Ottawa was able to see an opportunity to validate their work and to ensure they were on the right path.

Currently Toronto Hydro, SaskPower, BC Hydro and Hydro Ottawa are a few of the members that use data analytics tools. Toronto Hydro, SaskPower and Hydro One employ google analytics on their websites and on social media channels to understand click rates on online e-billing campaigns. Toronto Hydro monitors all their ads to see which ones are performing well. For example, last year Toronto Hydro submitted two ads as part of their e-billing campaign with different images and determined that parents with children performed better than ads geared towards older generations. These insights helped Toronto Hydro to adapt visual content to better promote local campaigns.

With these utilities having approximately 1.5 million customers, and with postage costs increasing every year, members can realize significant savings from a 1% to 2% increase in paperless adoption. By utilizing behavioral research, innovative tools, and analytics members can exceed the 50% ebilling enrollment rate.