In 2022, a large midwestern electric utility was seeking a solution to provide customers better insight as to what their current bill is trending towards. Over 40% of this utility’s customers are low-and- medium-income (LMI) individuals who face monthly financial struggles, so educating these customers about their current bill trend is a priority, to help them proactively act and avoid another financial hardship. GridX’s Bill Forecast feature exists for customers on the utility’s Energy Use Portal but requires several clicks within the customer’s journey in order to find the tool. Recognizing the value of showing customers their Bill Forecast easily, the utility sought to make it convenient and more accessible for customers.

When the utility recognized the challenge to better serve its LMI customers, it engaged with the Energy Use Portal vendor to find a solution. That vendor recommended the utility work directly with GridX to bring the Bill Forecast feature (which GridX provided) to a more visible position in the customer journey. GridX Empower APIs and widgets were the perfect solution for this use case as they seamlessly worked with Sitecore, the native web platform for the utility.

The utility’s Customer Experience team carved out a prominent location on the corporate homepage for Bill Forecast to reside, having it appear directly next to current bill information so customers can see both what has happened and what is coming. The GridX Empower widget offers a white label experience, so it conforms to the utility’s brand standards and visually presents flawlessly. When designing the widget, an additional link was added below the Bill Forecast to take customers directly to the Energy Use Portal, streamlining the customer journey and increasing access to more data. The widget achieved the goal of increasing access to data for all customers, including LMI, and doing so in an elegant manner.

The Bill Forecast widget is an “always accessible” resource to customers just by logging in to their account, which gives it a distinct advantage over tools like High Bill Alerts that are sent via text or email only when a customer is trending towards a certain threshold. This gives customers the ability to view it when and how they want, letting them answer the question of “what’s my next bill going to be” on their terms. High Bill Alerts were valuable tools when technology limited communication channels, but today they are antiquated and more likely to cause alarm than answer customer questions.