March 2020
Member Spotlight
In 2020, SECC will be recognizing a member each month, providing an organizational profile and highlighting the member's accomplishments and output in the smart energy space.
About BlastPoint
BlastPoint delivers data-driven software solutions for targeted, responsive customer engagement. Through machine learning and AI, BlastPoint discovers the humans behind energy companies’ data, allowing sales, marketing, customer service and technical teams to orchestrate operations efficiently, engage customers effectively, launch new initiatives, save money and generate revenue.
BlastPoint’s real-time, interactive software platform gets implemented in under three months, enabling energy providers to triple their ROI by capturing new customers, cutting costs and establishing themselves as leaders in this new and evolving energy ecosystem.
A Shifting Landscape
Energy providers are focused on cultivating lifelong relationships with their customers now more than they ever have been before. They know that personalization needs to be a core value. But with consumer choice, regulatory constraints and environmental concerns creating roadblocks to growth, utilities must adapt to a new way of thinking, and quickly.
BlastPoint partners with utilities across the U.S. and Canada to build data-backed, initiative-specific solutions that address these challenges with ease and speed. The BlastPoint platform is deployable across departments so that teams can provide a consistent customer experience and yield staggering results within just a few months.
Responsive Solutions to Specific Initiatives
BlastPoint helps utilities accomplish specific business goals. BlastPoint’s team consults with their energy partners to understand the issues they’re facing, the unique challenges their territory presents and the precise outcomes they wish to achieve.
Energy providers come to BlastPoint seeking to:
- Reduce the cost of paper billing by enrolling more customers into e-billing programs.
- Discover where to install the next electric vehicle charging stations.
- Build strategic partnerships with commercial businesses that are converting traditional fleet vehicles to electric.
- Better understand their customers’ journey over the course of a lifetime.
- Convert customers currently using other forms of power.
- Reach sustainability goals through more widespread adoption of energy efficiency programs.
- Enroll more existing customers into budget billing and energy assistance programs.
- Boost revenue by selling more supplemental services like energy audits and smart metering.
Predictive Analytics at Work
Once business initiatives are identified, BlastPoint integrates the utility’s internal customer data with relevant external data resources, then runs its proprietary algorithms to generate real-time results. This process includes scoring, ranking, clustering and segmentation, providing both the BlastPoint team and the utility with a street-level understanding of the people who live in that region, as well as highlighting the commercial businesses operating there. This analysis takes geographic, socioeconomic and demographic customer behavior factors as well as market trends into account.
Customer Personas that Inform Engagement
With territory-specific, integrated data, BlastPoint generates data-driven customer personas. Personas are detailed household or business-level segments containing data-backed information that is uniquely aligned with specified business initiatives.
Personas reveal behavioral information, such as spending habits and internet usage, as well as demographic factors like income, employment, marital status, language preference and more.
With BlastPoint’s predictive personas, utilities are equipped to build strategic campaigns that reach the right customers. Personas show who, within the utility’s territory, is most likely to:
- Enroll in paperless billing
- Respond swiftly to text or email communications
- Buy an electric vehicle within a year
- Convert a commercial fleet to electric
- Adopt energy efficiency products/services
- Miss a bill payment once or twice
- Miss bill payments chronically
- Enroll in energy assistance programs
- Respond only to snail mail
Messaging that Resonates
BlastPoint offers deeper analysis, helping energy providers tailor messaging so that it yields more responsive engagement. With data-driven personas, energy providers can craft advertising and sales messages that emphasize, for example:
- Cost savings or environmental benefits of paperless billing
- Technological savviness or the convenience of mobile app services
- Long-term financial savings or reduced emissions that result from converting to EVs
Further, utilities disseminate those messages through the appropriate channels based on BlastPoint’s analysis of which customers are most likely to respond to email marketing, Facebook ads, snail mail, text alerts, sales calls, etc. As a result, utilities can focus on the customers most likely to respond to a given initiative, saving time and resources, and ensuring they reach their goals.
