Trust is a must

Trust is key to the smart meter rollout, and to changing behaviour. Janet Wood reports from a Utility Week round table supported by Accenture

It is still not clear to energy customers why their utility would want them to use less, Accenture’s retail business service lead Richard Hepworth told delegates at a Utility Week roundtable on preparing for smart meters. He was highlighting the company’s recent research, which showed how far there was to go to develop the type of customer trust that would be needed to get the full benefit of smart meters.

The research sounded a warning against treating customers as an amorphous mass. Customer satisfaction would mean going beyond the meter to consider how to give different customers different types of benefit. Practically, customers would have different requirements when it came to price versus benefits, phone versus other channels – and each customer’s needs would change over time.

Anja Brown, commercial relationship manager with AgeUK, gave a brief update on a joint pilot project with Eon to install smart meters in a number of elderly people’s homes in the northwest. Although the project was at an early stage and subjects had volunteered for it, it had exploded some assumptions about the user group. They had not been nervous about using new technology and few needed follow-up calls or had to use the helpline that had been set up. But a dedicated “end to end” approach in dealing with the pilot group may have helped.

Audrey Gallacher, director of energy at Consumer Focus, said that customers were paying for smart meters and they must get the benefit from them. She was concerned that energy suppliers would “throw everything” at customers who were already well-informed and savvy about switching. That could mean the five million people in fuel poverty would be left behind again. She said that for many people energy was still a “cash and cheque” payment, and her fear was that “we will configure a programme that gets the best deals to people who are already on the best deals”.

The group asked: are we embarking on a smart meter rollout programme or a behaviour change programme? It was clear from the discussion that at this stage the rollout and installation were uppermost in utilities’ minds. The group talked about how that could best be managed and it was clear that trusted collaborators would have an important role to play. But there were few opportunities to target particular groups who would benefit from smart meters and use them to create customer pull. That would have little success, the group thought, because the ways customers would benefit from smart meters would vary. A single customer message, even to a defined group, would be too simplistic.

In the longer term, delivering behaviour change may also require utilities to work with trusted collaborators, the group thought, acknowledging that the trust question was one where utilities had a long way to go.

That raised the question of how and when to start getting messages out about smart meters. It was too early for large-scale campaigns, the group agreed: that would raise expectations and could mean that early adopters who wanted smart meters immediately would be disappointed. A carefully staged message was required and one that should come from the central delivery body, which is due to come into being late in the year. Another role for that body would be to keep track of smart meter comments and discussions already taking place on social media – and measure whether later campaigns had a positive effect.

In the meantime, there had to be some form of response to concerted anti-smart meter campaigns and single issues that could raise fears, such as the effect of wi-fi, but without building up the issue. Again, that seemed to rely on using trusted third parties, who would provide information that could be used as a standard response.

Trust, and the difficulty of gaining it, was the thread that ran throughout the discussion.

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 12th October 2012.

Get Utility Week’s expert news and comment – unique and indispensible – direct to your desk. Sign up for a trial subscription here: http://bit.ly/zzxQxx