April 2018
Member Spotlight
In 2018, 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 FirstFuel Software
FirstFuel Software is the global leader in business customer engagement for utilities. Their cloud-based platform delivers accurate, insightful and scalable intelligence to over 35 energy providers in North America and Europe. FirstFuel uses proprietary analytics to help energy providers meet core customer goals in the crucial and often overlooked non-residential segment – from the largest businesses down to the smallest. The FirstFuel SaaS platform supplements and strengthens business customer engagement channels, including digital/web, outbound marketing, phone-based sales and service, and live account management.
Business Customer Engagement
The FirstFuel platform is helping clients:
Create a world-class customer experience. FirstFuel generates customer intelligence by performing advanced analytics on energy usage data. That intelligence improves every interaction between energy providers and their customers.
Reduce service costs. FirstFuel delivers personalized insights at the individual facility level, providing information conveniently on customers' own time. This helps customers understand their energy use and find ways to save.
Meet program and product sales goals. FirstFuel enables marketing, sales and account teams to connect the right customer to the right service offer at the right time – improving sales and marketing outcomes at lower costs and faster speeds.
FirstFuel’s Technology
FirstFuel’s SaaS platform combines advanced building science, data science and cloud-based software expertise to generate business customer intelligence for use across your core customer engagement channels. Their insights are flexibly delivered through native applications or integrated within existing software investments to improve every business customer touchpoint, from web and mobile self-service to account management and service interactions.
Data Validation & Mapping
FirstFuel’s meter-to-building mapping process transforms interval and monthly meter data, billing data and account metadata into a whole-building view of every business customer – and then enhances it through proprietary techniques and third-party data. So, clients get a complete picture of their entire business customer base as well as a comprehensive profile of each individual business customer.
Advanced Analytics
FirstFuel’s advanced analytics engines interpret each business customer’s energy patterns and building characteristics to unearth key insights such as weather responses, occupancy patterns and energy end uses. Using these unique signatures, they identify building-specific energy efficiency, DER, electrification and rate plan recommendations that help customers better manage their energy use and costs. Armed with these insights, FirstFuel’s clients not only become trusted energy advisors, but also achieve their customer satisfaction, service and program adoption goals.
SaaS Applications
The FirstFuel SaaS platform is hosted in the cloud through Amazon Web Services. It scales seamlessly across millions of meters and customers, with stringent, industry-leading security protocols in place. FirstFuel helps its clients reach all of their customers without sacrificing system performance or data privacy. Quarterly releases provide ongoing enhancements and annual third-party security reviews and re-certifications provide utilities with the security, performance and reliability required in an increasingly complex digital world.
Integrations
FirstFuel’s insights can be integrated into both internal and customer-facing applications to enhance the value of your existing software investments and deliver improved experience and intelligence across multiple channels and devices to internal teams and customers alike.
Sample Success Story: Baltimore Gas & Electric
Baltimore Gas & Electric’s RCx program had been running successfully for several years and was delivering significant savings for their large building segment. But very few small and mid-sized buildings were engaging with the program. BGE partnered with ICF International (ICF) and FirstFuel Software to help close this gap in their program by embedding advanced analytics and leveraging customer intelligence to improve their sales process.
Within just seven months of implementing a redesigned program, called Building Tune-Up, BGE had doubled conversion rates and moved customers to project completion 50 percent faster. The redesigned program has created a win-win-win: value for customers, value for trade allies and value for the utility.
According to BGE, this approach “has created a paradigm shift” in the way Account Representatives present BGE’s RCx programs, providing a more personalized, valuable customer experience as well as increased energy efficiency savings. The program has demonstrated the power and importance of using data analytics to develop customer-centric programs that drive real business results.
