IDC has released its Worldwide Digital Customer Engagement Solutions for Utilities – 2021 Vendor Assessment MarketScape report and named Bidgely to its top tier “Leader” category — one of only three vendors worldwide to earn that distinction.

The report was designed to provide energy utilities around the globe with insight into the current capabilities and future strategies of digital customer engagement (DCE) software vendors as a guide for end-to-end digital customer engagement solution deployment.

Why Bidgely?

The report highlights the varied ways in which Bidgely’s UtilityAI™ delivers value through energy disaggregation, energy profiling, and a next-best interaction (NBI) engine. It speaks to the diversity of UtilityAI solutions, including the omni-channel Customer Engagement Suite, the Analytics Workbench business intelligence tool, and the wide-ranging Enterprise Analytics APIs and Widgets. The report also calls out the availability of UtilityAI solutions for call centers, home energy reports, and energy product marketplaces (CARE for Call Center, Home Energy Reports, and Smart Shop). 

Analysts emphasize that utilities can access Bidgely’s customer engagement solutions through the technology approach best suited to their IT infrastructure, including as standalone software modules, as an integrated suite, or as data APIs and widgets that can be fed or embedded into existing systems, data flows, and frontends. 

In this way, by rejecting the one-solution-fits-all approach, Bidgely enables utilities to disaggregate Bidgely insights and reaggregate them into their existing workflows and systems to enrich and extend the ROI on the IT investments they’ve already made. Bidgely also doesn’t pressure its customers to purchase functionality they don’t need. Instead, utilities can choose the DATA plug-in for MDM and data hubs, the CRM plug-in for CRM and CIS, the Service plug-in for call centers, the Journey plug-in for marketing automation, the Digital plug-in for digital channels, a Business Intelligence plug-in for business reporting and analysis and the energy profile and insights plug-in for data lakes and data warehouses.

The Marketscape report emphasizes that Bidgely’s core technology has been organically developed for almost a decade and has 17 patents for load disaggregation, and that unlike other players that mainly offer statistical energy disaggregation, Bidgely disaggregates more than nine electric loads and more than three gas loads based on actual appliance signatures. This approach captures every change in usage behavior, which translates into more accurate insights.

IDC analysts weighed geographic presence as an important factor in their ranking. Bidgely was recognized for services to customers across North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific, rapidly expanding its customer base during 2020. IDC underscored that Bidgely’s user interface assets are designed for internationalization and multi-language support, with products currently served in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Slovak. With more than 30 utility partners in 15 countries, Bidgely’s solid presence in international markets is added to our scoring as a Leader. 

Bidgely’s ecosystem relationships were identified as a major plus, including those with Infosys, IBM, TCS, Wipro, Itron, Salesforce, Amazon, Home Depot, Samsung, HomeAdvisor, HomeServe, and Electrum. The report said that by leveraging APIs, Bidgely has predesigned integration options for most third-party systems, limiting the need for system integration work.

What this Means for Bidgely Customers

Bidgely is recognized for key advantages:

  1. Bidgely’s approach to energy disaggregation, energy behavioral profiling, and next-best interactions that enable utility customers to carry out extremely personalized customer engagement, which serves to increase revenues, improve NPS or customer satisfaction, meet regulatory requirements, carry out demand-side management, and facilitate grid stability.

UtilityAI embodies the artificial intelligence made possible by millions of data points collected via gas and electric AMI and non-smart meters. Patented appliance signature-based disaggregation extracts fingerprints from hourly (or more granular) energy usage data to identify true customer behavior. Using meter data and analyses of actual customer energy habits, Bidgely’s patented machine learning technology creates the world’s most accurate customer energy profiles across 100+ attributes and delivers actionable insights for every customer in a service territory. These insights are continuously improved and personalized as customers go about their daily lives and engage with the utility over time. 

  1. Bidgely’s support of essential functionality like descriptive engagement (via the company’s preferred-channel personalized Home Energy Reports), diagnostic engagement (via usage alerts, high bill alerts, and web analyzer), predictive engagement (via bill projection estimates, rate/tariff plan analysis, seasonal alerting), and prescriptive engagement (via savings advice, demand response, and home audits). 

Bidgely’s next-gen AI-powered Smart Alerts deliver personalized web- and mobile-based energy experiences at every stage in the customer journey. Leveraging our patented artificial intelligence techniques to itemize appliance-level energy usage in the home, Smart Alerts empower utilities and energy retailers to more successfully engage customers with a program of emails, SMS and mobile app messages that are tailored to each individual customer’s energy consumption patterns with unique insights, alert triggers, and delivery frequency and timing. The end-to-end Smart Alert customer journey promotes energy and cost savings, behavioral changes, product and service investment and more through a continuous conversation:

  • Recruiting: A series of nudges to motivate as many customers as possible to enroll in a utility program and/or consent to share their energy usage data.
  • On-Boarding: A series of alerts that welcome customers to a new program and provide immediate and ongoing weekly usage insights to ensure positive reinforcement while managing expectations.
  • Engaging: Alerts designed to build customer relationships and provide smart energy use encouragement at pre-determined intervals during each billing cycle and in response to specific ad-hoc customer energy use event triggers such as a high bill warning.
  1. Bidgely’s decision to use outcome-based contracts based on the achieved customer engagement results. For example, if energy efficiency is the goal, the solution of emails/web/ paper reports is priced to achieve a certain level of energy efficiency (kWh) per cost.

For example, by modernizing and personalizing customer engagement, Bidgely helped Rocky Mountain Power customers generate 41GWhs of energy savings, and  delivered these savings at an average of approximately 4 cents per kilowatt hour – an approximately 25 percent cost reduction.

UtilityAI: Helping Utilities Seize the Opportunity

One of the report’s essential takeaways is that even though the digital customer engagement industry has reached maturity, many utilities are not yet leveraging the advantages it offers. 

In a post-pandemic world in which customers of all age groups became more attentive to their energy consumption and reached out to their suppliers across a multitude of channels, utilities and energy retailers can’t afford to waste this opportunity to create more stickiness with their customers through rich, personalized digital interactions designed to better inform their customers to encourage better commodity usage behaviors and generate new product and service revenue.

IDC suggests that by investing in digital customer engagement solutions, utilities will be in a better position to realize benefits such as improving customer satisfaction and net promoter scores (NPS) in competitive markets, lowering customer effort scores (CES), enhancing customer lifetime value, and lowering the cost to serve. 

To read more, request your copy of the Worldwide Digital Customer Engagement Solutions for Utilities – 2021 Vendor Assessment MarketScape report excerpt. 

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