THE CHALLENGE
Utilities are up against a number of headwinds in their industry. One is competition. Utility consumers have grown to expect more support from all of their vendor interactions. Deregulated markets have intensified the situation, allowing consumers to swap energy providers. One way utilities can compete is through better consumer engagement. A great way to do that is through offering more flexibility with payment options. Another impact to utilities is the need to increase energy efficiency of their consumers. A third headwind is relatively new, but very impactful. The COVID pandemic and the resulting moratoria on service disconnects has produced a mountain of debt owed to utilities. This has been estimated to be over $50 billion across the nation, 3 to 4 times the normal bad debt utilities face annually.
ITRON APPROACH
Itron has been a global leader in the utility prepay energy solution arena for over 25 years in dozens of countries with over 20 million prepay endpoints.
With Itron Smart Pay, a prepay solution, utilities have a proven North American prepay solution that is backed by Itron’s support and services teams, ensuring security and performance and is integrated into all Itron AMI communication offerings. Itron Smart Pay can also take advantage of the industry leading Itron Distributed Intelligence (DI) in RIVA enabled meters. Itron has plans to incorporate meter edge computing to deliver unique consumer prepay experiences.
BENEFITS
A utility can address all three of the previously mentioned impacts with Itron Smart Pay. Prepay has also been shown to:
- Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 points or more (translating to a bump in ROE according to JD Powers)
- Help consumers reduce energy consumption by 3 – 12%
- Be able to recover up to 80% of existing arrearages (bad debt)
- Improve operational efficiency with reduced call center volumes and fewer truck rolls
