Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative doles out six awards for best practices in 2024

At the 2024 Consumer Symposium, the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) recently announced winners of its 2024 Best Practices Awards, meant to honor the unique ways that providers have improved customer experience and engagement in the past year. 

“Over the past year, consumers and small businesses have faced a number of challenges, including high energy costs and inflation,” SECC President and CEO Nathan Shannon said. “This year’s winners demonstrate how electricity providers are playing an important role in helping communities meet these challenges today while advancing a smarter, cleaner energy ecosystem for tomorrow. We hope they will pave the way for other providers to follow.”

This marked the seventh annual iteration of the awards, each chosen by an independent advisory panel of industry experts. They chose from electricity providers in the United States and Canada, with a focus on programs, technologies, and strategies that have delivered benefits for residential and/or small business utility customers. Recipients included: 

1. Hydro One – winner of the Smart Energy Innovation Award for using AI-driven data analytics to improve the customer experience for electric vehicle (EV) drivers and investigate the impact of EVs on the grid
2. Avangrid – winner of the Culture Transformation Award for developing the Digital Center of Excellence (COE), a cross-functional business unit
3. PSEG Long Island – winner of the Consumer Engagement Award for engaging customers in a time-of-use (TOU) rate pilot program with a rate comparison tool, personalized savings information, updated bill designs, a multi-channel communications campaign, and more
4. NB Power – winner of the Energy Equity Award as a result of a comprehensive energy efficiency program for low-income homeowners that offered relief in the face of high energy costs and improved home comforts
5. ComEd – winner of the Consumer Education Award for deploying Powering Lives Resource Fairs to connect customers with assistance, such as LIHEAP, health screenings, food giveaways, and more
6. Dominion Energy – winner of the SMB Engagement Award for redesigning an existing small business energy efficiency program to help local businesses endure the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic

For its part, the success of ComEd’s programs went beyond the awards. The company noted in a statement that it plans to partner with community organizations again this year to support further resource fairs due to their success in 2023. 

“By working directly with the communities, we learned what specific solutions would provide the most positive impact on families in these neighborhoods,” said Melissa Washington, ComEd’s Chief Customer Officer and senior vice president of customer operations. “And we learned that families don’t just need help paying bills, they need that help to be easier to access and more immediate.”

This year also ushered ComEd, Avangrid, and NB Power into a small group of companies to have received honors multiple times from the Best Practices Awards.