PSEG Long Island honored with award for digital engagement

PSEG Long Island received an award recently for innovation in digital engagement.

The CS Week Expanding Excellence Award for Innovation in Digital Engagement recognizes PSEG Long Island for its successful rate modernization effort. This effort saw the utility lower customer bills by an average of 10 percent and shift 4-5 percent of electricity load out of the peak.

Through this initiative, PSEG Long Island enrolled more than 14,000 customers in Time-of-Use (TOU) rates, more than double the original target. The success of the program led their governing authority, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), to move forward with a full-scale TOU rollout to all 1.2 million PSEG Long Island customers starting in 2024.

“Modern rate structures like Time-of-Use are becoming a priority to manage an increasingly complex grid, maximize our investment in distributed energy resources and ultimately achieve decarbonization targets,” Brian Kurtz, manager of special projects and Utility 2.0 Project Management Office, PSEG Long Island, said. “However, ensuring an optimal customer experience is critical to the success of these efforts. Our meticulous focus on customer research to design the program and the use of analytics tools to communicate to customers how the new rates would personally impact them led to a successful rollout that exceeded our expectations and set us up for a very promising future.”

PSEG Long Island embarked on a rate modernization initiative in December of 2021 as a focal program within its Utility of the Future (Utility 2.0) portfolio. They partnered with GridX, Questline Digital, ILLUME Advising, Bidgely and IDLab Global to develop their TOU pilot.

This led to the deployment of a rate comparison tool for MyAccount, personalized savings included in direct customer communications, and a “1-Click” no log-in solution to easily select their best rate plan option. Further, bill designs were enhanced to provide clear and concise information on Time-of-Use energy usage and costs. The engagement campaign targeted customers through owned channels such as email, website, direct mail, and video marketing tactics.

“Implementing new Time-of-Use rates, which essentially changes the way people use and pay for electricity, is an incredibly complex task. It requires multiple departments within a utility to collaborate to ensure a successful transition,” Nayan Parikh, technology group product manager, PSEG Long Island, said. “This complexity was compounded by the need to break down organizational silos in terms of the data we collect, analyze and share. We addressed this challenge head on by creating a single source of truth on a shared platform all groups could collaborate on, which has been instrumental to our rate-modernization success.”

PSEG provided electricity to 1.2 million customers on Long Island in New York.