June 17, 2024 Earlier this year, Energia, a leading renewable energy provider in Ireland, enhanced its smart tariff offer with actionable energy insights powered by Eliq. Their journey to the energy transition is ramping up and Energy Insights brings customers on board for the ride! Energia, part of Energia Group, is an Irish energy provider that entered the Irish market in 1999 as a B2B energy provider and in 2014, the company expanded to the residential market. Nowadays, Energia is a leading and one of the longest providers of renewable electricity in Ireland, covering 18% of the island’s electricity requirements. In early 2024, Energia boosted its digital customer portal Energia Online with Energy Insights powered by Eliq to put smart-tariff customers in the driver’s seat of their energy usage and bills. Six months later, we spoke with the team at Energia and interviewed Maria McCabe, Product Owner at Energia in depth about their motivations, progress, and results with Energy Insights. Final destination: The energy transition Maria starts with an up close and personal introduction of Energia: The company’s history, vision and how it drives Energia’s operations. All the electricity we supply to our domestic or residential customers is 100% renewable – It is something we’ve always stood by and are quite proud of. Everything we do from a marketing strategy point of view is very much aligned with the energy transition and Ireland’s Climate Action Strategy thus helping Ireland reach our 2030 climate action targets. We are at the brink of the energy transition and knowing that the energy industry is changing. At Energia, we need to be a part of that change and take customers with us on the journey. As Maria tells us, customers are on a different terminal. Most energy users need help understanding energy in general, much more their own usage. From Maria’s point of view, aligning on this journey is all about customer education. This is what ignited Energia to provide Energy Insights. Maria takes us back to the time Energia was formulating this very problem. Our customers are becoming more energy aware, in particular since Smart Metering has been launched in Ireland in the last couple of years, and they want more control over their energy usage. We had always provided customers with general usage overviews and stats, but we needed a more intelligent solution. We knew we needed to do more for our customers, by providing them with more insightful data and giving them better control over energy usage. Energy management ensures that customers are coming on board the energy transition journey – with us, with the rest of the country, and with the rest of the world. It is a way for everyone to get involved in changing their habits. All aboard Energy Insights Influencing customers is a high-level, high-stakes challenge for any energy provider to tackle but Energia articulated the problem sharply and the solution in energy management effectively. Energia was on the lookout for a “full package” solution and ultimately landed in integrating Eliq-powered insights via API to their existing digital offer. Simon Markey, Senior Technical Delivery Manager at Energia, explains: Energia recognised that the existing offering for customers to view their smart usage data was not market-leading. We wanted to adhere to our “buy not build” strategy which led us to look to the wider market. Eliq’s data sets results in meaningful comparisons to other households, the use of external data sources such as weather forecasts to predict future usage and models driving estimated usage categories were key deciding factors for selecting the Eliq solution. During the procurement process Eliq’s passion for their product shone through. The reactiveness of the Eliq webapp to different form factors saved a lot of development time. Jenny Livingstone, Head of Product Development at Energia, elaborates: We went with Eliq for speed to market and to get something out there quickly to get learnings from our customers. We wanted to hit the ground running quickly to respond to customer need, so choosing an established provider made sense. We carried out a thorough analysis of options in the market and implemented a robust procurement process. Maria adds some decisive factors: It came down to the overall package: The design of the software, the features, customisability. We wanted to get something up and running rapidly and Eliq was a solution for that with the quick integration capabilities. Navigating past complexities For a fully successful launch, Energia identified the need to design seamless processes for onboarding their smart tariff customers in their digital solution. The accuracy of cost displays was paramount, requiring meticulous integration of the correct time bands and tariff details. Simon tells us: Although we were purchasing the Eliq solution we still needed to design processes to enable customers to register for the service, use APIs to send the customer’s last 12 months of data and pass new data each day. To ensure accurate costs were displayed the design had to ensure we passed Eliq the correct time bands and costs for the customer’s tariff and trigger sending of new tariff details if the customer altered their product or a price change occurred. Given the smart data was being sent to a 3rd party customer consent was captured and processes were built to allow a customer to opt out. Within this process, Energia identified another aspect that was imperative to have in place before the launch: Data privacy. At the time around the launch, data privacy concerns dominated the public discourse in Ireland. However, as Maria clarifies, users can have a smart meter and leverage the smart tariff that comes with it but they can opt out of sharing their data. Irish smart meter data is subject to GDPR and the data controller is the ESB Network, the electricity network licensed in the Republic of Ireland. Smart meter data is shared exclusively with the relevant suppliers. With data privacy being the priority number 1 for Energia, Eliq’s data privacy processes were tested from top to bottom. Eshan Fernando, Client Success Manager at Eliq, adds: Energia was deeply invested in data privacy and wanted to ensure we had the processes in place. During this test, Eliq ran through all the GDPR-related processes and all our security measures. We even ran a pentest to make sure that our security measures were in place and robust. The test was passed and Energy Insights was launched happily ever after. A few weeks later, the Energia Energy Insights was out in the world for every customer to use. Leading customer service on board It has been almost 4 months since the launch and approximately one in three smart meter customers are using Energy Insights. Maria paints us a picture of the first reactions and shares some key metrics. Over 33% of our smart tariff customers are already opted in to Energy Insights after three months, which is excellent. What is key is that our customers are using the software. More importantly, these customers who are really interested in energy and data are highly engaged as well. For example, in May, out of all the customers registered, over 50% of customers were active, so the engagement rates are excellent. As Energia keeps a finger on the pulse of customer attitudes, Maria shares some of the user sentiments from their recent survey on Energy Insights. Customers are loving the fact that they can see their usage by day, across each hour and how much it’s costing them, which they couldn’t really see with our previous solution. They like the household comparison to similar homes and the appliance category usage breakdown is also really helpful. However, Energy Insights has an additional compounding effect on Energia’s position in the Irish energy landscape as the leading, trusted clean energy provider. Other energy providers in Ireland don’t have a similar solution yet. So it’s really important for us to set the scene and claim that leading position in the energy space in Ireland. Next stop: Ireland’s energy transition partner Energia’s aims to maintain the engagement rates high and continue improving the solution based on user feedback. Zooming out, Energia’s goals include solidifying the relationship with their customers, continue providing an offer that delights customers, and becoming their trusted energy transition partners and experts. The energy industry is currently experiencing many changes from a climate and technological perspective. Changing consumer behaviours and needs also come into play. Over the next 2 years, we are planning for dynamic tariffs and more personalised products to suit our customers’ changing needs. Success for Energia would see Energy Insights and the Eliq platform being used actively to display usage seamlessly across all tariff/plan types – showing usage across all time bands throughout the day. We genuinely want customers to benefit from and enjoy the enhanced insights to make proactive changes to their home energy usage behaviour. We want to see real engagement in what was historically a low-interest industry. We also have plans to upgrade our Commercial Insights solutions and we’d love to collaborate with Eliq for those enhancements also. Energia and Maria in particular share the dedication we at Eliq have come to see in energy professionals time and time again. With the energy transition in the steady hands of this professional community, we can look towards the global climate goals with optimism. We asked Maria to close the interview by addressing her peers. The energy space at present is a difficult, but extremely exciting industry to work in. One of the key challenges is finding the balance between increasing customer education which in turn could result in greater efficiency amongst customers leading to a reduction in overall energy usage and ultimately keeping our business afloat. But energy education is the right thing to do. At the same time, the positives and the opportunities presented to us are new and energising! All of my colleagues at Energia Group are so passionate and love their job so that’s a good sign! We could -and should- be all proper in our conclusion but Maria’s warmth and Energia inspired us at Eliq to also address the energy space and its professionals openly: Energy geeks – we are honoured to be working with you daily, it is an absolute joy! 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