Summer charm offensives

The summer heat can present utilities with difficulties, but also with a golden opportunity to connect with customers. Mathew Beech explains how.

The British summer is finally upon us, and many people’s thoughts will drift to memories of endless school holidays; trips to the beach; long, lazy days lounging about with a cool drink; the scorching summer of ’76; parched lawns; stuffy offices and sweltering commutes.

For utilities, however, the summer months also bring with them a series of challenges. Water companies must gear up for their peak demand week, while energy suppliers have to deal with plant being offline for repairs and maintenance as well as a higher than normal demand driven by the wider use of cooling systems.

This presents utilities with the ideal opportunity to reach out with engagement campaigns and tap into the summer mood.

This not only gives them the opportunity to mitigate and tackle some of the peak demand seen over July and August, but also to build a rapport with the consumer base.

Demand can grow as the mercury rises

The high summer period for electricity use is between 1 June and 31 August. This also tends to coincide with the greatest number of planned generator outages.

This limits National Grid’s wiggle room for balancing the system, especially since demand can increase, predominantly driven by the use of cooling systems.

While peak and minimum demand levels fell to their lowest ever levels in 2015– 35.7GW and 18.1GW respectively – encouraging people to use less would help give the system that bit of extra room to manoeuvre.

For water companies, they can typically see demand increase by 20-25 per cent during the summer months, and combined with low rainfall that puts additional pressures on their resources (see table).

Encouraging people to use less, and use what they do smarter, will ease that burden.

The summer holidays present people with a break in their busy work and school lives and are often seen by families as a chance to reconnect with each other.

It is the same for utilities and their customers. By offering efficiency tips, educational programmes for children off school, gifts, and essential safety messages to help people safely enjoy their surroundings, it is a chance for them to reconnect too.

Trust in energy companies hit a low of 32 per cent in 2014, although it has since grown to 58 per cent in the Edelman trust barometer. Continuing to engage customers with positive messages is one way to help this develop and grow further.

For water companies, trust levels have been steady at about 77 per cent over the past couple of years, but with Ofwat pursuing its trust and confidence agenda, now is no time for them to be complacent. 

National Grid says: ‘Take it with you’

National Grid’s “Take it with you” campaign urges holidaymakers to ensure their summer holidays do not end in tragedy, by taking a carbon monoxide (CO) alarm with them when they go away.

The company has undertaken research to find out how alert holidaymakers are to the risk of CO poisoning at privately rented holiday accommodation.

• 50 per cent of those surveyed said they weren’t worried by the issue;
• 47 per cent didn’t check whether there was a CO alarm in the property they stayed at on their last holiday;
• 84 per cent didn’t have a portable CO detector.

Other statistics reveal that many people don’t recognise the main indicators of a potentially faulty gas appliance such as:

• excessive condensation (79 per cent unaware);
• yellow or orange flame (77 per cent unaware);
• pilot light that blows out easily (69 per cent unaware);
• black or brownish marks and yellow stains around the gas appliance (69 per cent unaware);
• 19 per cent didn’t know any of the indicators;
• 17 per cent thought there were no indicators.

Phil Clarke, head of gas operations at National Grid’s London Network, says: “With holidaymakers increasingly shunning hotels and resorts in favour of homes from private rental websites it’s important that we remind them to check that the gas appliances are safe.

“Most people are not gas safety experts so the best advice is to take a CO alarm with you.”

Known as the “silent killer”, carbon monoxide poisoning kills more than 50 people a year in the UK, and 4,000 attend hospital with carbon monoxide symptoms.

Bristol Water serves up The Water Bar

Last year, the newly recruited communications team at Bristol Water started thinking of new ways to connect with customers at summer events and festivals. Being at these events is a great way to connect with people, but the summer is about having fun, we don’t want to bore people just handing out water efficiency packs and talking about issues. We wanted to do things differently and create a good feeling around the Bristol Water brand.

After many elaborate plans we asked ourselves, what do our customers want or expect from us? Simple: water. Good value water. Why should it be any different at a festival?

So Bristol Water created a pop-up water bar to take to events across the supply area. Complete with beer pumps, adjusted to pump water only of course, and artwork from local artists Loch Ness giving the whole thing a very “Bristol” vibe.

Its first outing was on 9 July at Bristol Pride and it went down brilliantly. Customers loved it. Just what they wanted when they wanted it. It’s not very often you get groups of students chanting “We love Bristol Water” but at Pride they did.

“Pride was a great event, we connected with a diverse range of our customers. Men, women, old, young, people dressed in rubber, all sorts. We got to talk to people about all sorts of things, including the value of water compared to bottled water.

“For a lot of customers this was the first time they had really thought about Bristol Water and so it was great that this was a positive first contact,” says Alison Jennings, communications manager at Bristol Water.

The Bar has a few more appearances this summer including Bristol’s International Balloon Fiesta in August.

Rob Ellis, press and public relations officer, Bristol Water