Fall event season is in full swing, and the GridX team has been attending, speaking and demonstrating GridX products all across the country. We recently attended two very different events, one focused on key account management for large customers and one laser-focused on customer experience.
We talked to members of our team to get some of their key takeaways, what they heard people talking about, and what is coming up next. The fall season might be wrapping up soon, but spring event season is just around the corner!
Key Account Management Event
What We Heard:
Large customers are moving at a rapid pace to decarbonize and electrify which is often at odds with what utilities can readily support – both in terms of infrastructure and market mechanisms.
For example, Walmart mentioned that their public chargers will have the equivalent load of a Walmart Supercenter. With additional load growth, increased automation, fleet electrification and public chargers, current sites will increase their electricity demand by 2-5x.
If you’ve ever driven down a highway, you’ve seen the large Pilot travel centers at almost every exit. In a related example, they are rolling out 2000 EV chargers across 500 of those centers.
Navigating rates across hundreds of utility service territories is impacting their speed to market and having consistent EV rates (i.e. hourly pricing) would make their site selection easier and lead to the best customer experience.
What We Did:
In addition to listening and learning from the various sessions, GridX also met with several utilities to demo our GridX Key Account Management product (KAM).
GridX KAM organizes all commercial accounts into portfolios that surface insights such as potential savings to support proactive account management. Within a portfolio, KAMs can quickly identify better rates, explore usage and cost trends and generate various reports.
For sites considering changes such as hours of operations, DER adoption and/or electrification, KAMs can perform real time analysis using GridX’s modifier framework. Examples of modifiers include load shifts, solar, battery storage and heat pumps.
What’s Next?
From the sessions we attended and demo feedback we received, it’s clear that GridX has a role to play in helping utilities respond to the rapid pace of innovation driven by large commercial customers.
This includes the development and marketing of new rates that better support new business models like DC fast chargers and data centers powering AI. Large customers also need help in forecasting how this growth and adoption of new technologies will affect their energy spend and carbon footprint.
A common thread throughout the event was partnerships, and it’s clear that attendees are all in on using partnerships with companies like GridX to be the clean energy catalysts we need for a decarbonized future.
Customer Engagement Event
What We Heard:
This event brought a lot of insight to the challenges utilities are currently experiencing while finding ways to reach their clean energy goals and develop new modern rate structures such as Time-of-Use (TOU) rates.
Some customer concerns include how to bill for TOU and other complex rates, engaging and educating customers for its TOU transition,targeting customers with right TOU transition messages and perhaps most importantly, engaging customers and getting them excited and involved in adopting complex rate products.
The good news is that there are currently solutions to help combat these challenges and many of them include educating customers on these new rates.
What We Did:
Demos, demos, and more demos! The GridX team got a lot of chances to show interested parties how we can be their clean energy catalyst and give them the tools they need to achieve their decarbonization goals.
Our most popular demos were our GridX Calculate (Advanced Billing Solution) and Empower (APIs) + CSR integrated with Legacy CIS .
Attendees were keen to learn more about our complex billing to support TOU rates our whole population rate analyses to segment and target customers and how our rate and cost analytics web services power customer engagement channels.
What’s Next?
It’s all about those second generation smart meters!
As customers become savvier in an increasingly digital, on-demand world, their energy options will continue to grow. This is good for improving customer satisfaction and addressing climate and environmental concerns. It is potentially a good thing for utilities, too.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is key to providing broader opportunities for customers as well as utility service providers. It allows utilities to collect real-time customer data, and it gives customers insights into their energy usage and can incentivize them to enroll a complex
billing solution rather than a flat rate structure, either through a self-service option or by calling their utility.
You can find us next at the 48th PLMA Conference.
