January 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 GridX
GridX’s Business Operation Support Cloud (BOS Cloud) is a suite of cloud-based applications that enables utilities to upgrade and streamline their business and customer operations. BOSS applications enable utilities to develop better rates, services and programs to meet their financial and policy goals; more effectively target and market new rates to customers; efficiently operationalize and bill for these rates; and better engage customers with personalized compelling analyses. Through centralized management of rate portfolios, BOS Cloud provides turnkey analytical and operational support for business processes throughout a utility’s “rate life cycle.”
GridX solutions are the toolbox-of-choice for utilities managing rate reforms and transitions, particularly time-of-use (TOU) rates. Their clients include some of the largest and most innovative utilities, retail energy suppliers and community choice aggregators. These companies use GridX solutions because they provide Operation and Maintenance (O&M) savings, improve customer engagement and ultimately boost the performance of business and customer operations.
Toolbox for TOU Rate Reforms and Transitions
GridX provides a turnkey suite of applications designed to support and streamline TOU rate transitions. These applications provide analytical and operational support for a complete product life cycle of a utility. GridX applications have been developed in partnership with early-adopter utilities that have completed TOU rate transitions and, therefore, incorporate best practices that have been developed along the way.
- Rate Design Tool – The GridX Rate Design Tool enables utilities to develop rate designs, evaluate their impact on revenues and determine the best rates to meet their policy and financial goals.
- Rate Marketing Tool – The GridX Rate Marketing Tool enables a utility to understand the value proposition of different rate structures for each customer, so that they can target customers with more effective marketing messages and campaigns.
- Customer Engagement 360 Cloud – The GridX Customer Engagement 360 Cloud delivers compelling and relevant content to customers across all touchpoints and throughout the rate transition cycles.
- Retail Billing System – The GridX Retail Billing System is a cloud-based interval billing system, used to support TOU and other complex rates using raw interval data without pre-aggregation. Whether integrating with a traditional CIS, or with other off-the-shelf cloud services, our interval billing system enables energy providers to upgrade a traditional CIS at a fraction of the cost and risk.
- Settlement System – The GridX Settlement System enables utilities to implement complex business models in conjunction with TOU transitions by supporting multi-party retail and wholesale settlements.
- CSR Rate Analysis Tool – The GridX CSR Rate Analysis Tool enables a call center representative (CSR) to perform ad hoc rate analyses in real time for customers on the phone, to quickly and more effectively answer questions about rates, pricing, bills and costs.
- Key Account Management Tool – The GridX Key Account Management Tool enables a key account manager to perform a variety of personalized and scenario-based usage, rate, bill and cost analyses for a large customer across the customer’s organizational hierarchy.
Customer Engagement 360 Cloud
The success of TOU rate reforms and transitions depends on customer adoption of these new rates and programs. GridX BOS Cloud provides support for customer engagement through a set of web services called Customer Engagement 360 Cloud, which includes the following capabilities:
- Interval Cost (iCost) – iCost provides customers with energy cost and pricing signals on an hourly basis so that customers can be mindful of the time variant rates.
- Rate Comparison – Rate Comparison evaluates the customer’s historical consumption under multiple eligible rates and compares the current costs and new rates for customers
- Best Rates – Identifies and alerts customers to their least costly rate options, based on the cost analysis under all eligible rates and options.
- Bill Comparison – Bill Comparison compares the current bill with the last month’s and last year’s bills, and identifies the factors that contribute the most to a customer’s bill changes.
- Cost Saving Analyses – Compares the customer’s current bills under new rates, and hypothetical bills that customers would have paid at previous rates. This helps customers to identify their realized cost savings after a rate switch.
- Bill-to-Date – Monitors customer energy consumption and evaluates the bill amount throughout the billing cycle to give customers a daily update on their bills.
- Bill Forecast – Provides the most up-to-date forecast of the final monthly bill amounts. Customers can set thresholds at which they want to be alerted via text or emails when their bills exceed their personalized thresholds.
GridX Customer Engagement 360 Cloud enables utilities to engage customers across all customer communication channels throughout the rate reform and transition programs. The content of the web services can be embedded in channels, such as direct mail, bill inserts, utilities’ own My Account websites, third-party energy portals integrated with the utilities’ websites, third-party websites (such as those of electric vehicle dealers, energy efficiency providers and community solar developers), interactive voice response (IVRs), as well as high-touch customer services, such as call center CSRs and key account executives. A single set of web services ensures a consistent customer experience and coordinated messaging across all touchpoints.
GridX Customer Engagement 360 Web Services are based on cost savings to make customer engagement more compelling and relevant. As new rates are introduced and existing rates are revised, the same consumption behavior may result in different costs under different rates. With time-variant rates, which may price energy consumption differently each hour, the cost of energy may vary even with the same usage level. The cost-saving-based content is more compelling to customers and enables utilities to have conversations with their customers in the language they are most familiar with – dollars and cents.
To learn more about GridX, visit www.gridx.com or contact GridX’s Director of Business Development Erin Christy at erin@gridx.com.
