[Kevin Praet (Adm)]

Hello Customer Analytics Community Members,

I hope all is well! We are one week away from our May (2023) Customer Analytics Community Conversation and want to get you excited about the session taking place. On Tuesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM CT, we’ll be joined by Jeremy Cappello, Principal Marketing Specialist, Small Business Energy Efficiency at DTE Energy who will be leading a discussion around, “Data-Driven Customer Engagement for SMB Energy Efficiency.” As this discussuon will be interactive, we encourage you to come prepared with questions and your insight.

Learn more about this session and our speaker below!

Session Description:

The small-to-medium business (SMB) market can be challenging to engage and discuss their energy needs and opportunities to save. Many SMB customers typically do not have a dedicated energy manager and have limited time and budget to consider energy upgrades. Traditional approaches to reach these customers are usually focused on mailings, and cold calls or “in person visits”. At DTE in Michigan, their SMB program manager and E Source partnered up to use data science to better target the right SMB customers, at the right time with the right message. Typically marketing campaigns will segment SMB customers by their industry attributes, such as NAICS or SIC codes. These give high level insight into what the business does, but these industry attributes alone do not really provide any depth into really understanding a customer and what incentivizes them. This leads to making assumptions and prematurely discounting their propensity to contribute.

The DTE data science approach differs by using novel feature engineering during the modeling stage to create new features from raw data, increasing the predictive power of learning algorithms. Along with industry attributes, DTE added energy usage behavior, interaction behavior, firmographics and building structural attributes. As well as local market features.

Session Takeaways:

• Understand the full picture of each customer and their energy needs through an “Audience of One” data science approach

• Using leading AI models we generate predictions in their behavior and likeliness to participate in future energy savings offers based on historical data of “like” customers

• Generated a propensity score for each customer to understand their driving factors for participation, their potential contribution to the program and how to engage them

• On-going actual and predictive results are visualized in E Source’s OneInform tool

• Visibility into the current SMB customers that have participated in energy efficiency programs and how much they are contributing to savings.

• Ability to predict who will most likely contribute to energy savings and how much savings those customers are likely to contribute

• Second phase of the project is to hand off this OneInform tool with the actual and predictive information to DTEs Energy Advisors to assist them in deciding who to visit and have information on that customer to help facilitate the energy discussion

Speaker: Jeremy Cappello, Principal Marketing Specialist, Small Business Energy Efficiency (DTE Energy)

Jeremy Cappello brings over 10 years of utility experience with a background in regulatory policy, portfolio design and strategic marketing. For the last 4 years, he has had the responsibility of developing DTE Energy’s small business EE programs and pilots. His education includes a BBA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Wayne State University. 
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A calendar placeholder for this community conversation was sent out via my alternate email address (kpraet@sg.utilityanalytics.com). I’ve noticed these invites can sometimes be flagged as spam, so please check your junk folders if you’re not seeing right away. For your convenience I have also attached the placeholder to this message as an easy download. If you are not seeing a placeholder on your calendar for Tuesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM CT, or are having trouble downloading the placeholder from this message, please reach back out to me so I can be sure you are forwarded the invite an alternate way.

Thanks and I look forward to connecting next week!

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Kevin Praet
Membership Coordinator
Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
Boulder CO
315-440-3033
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-01-2023 12:30
From: Kevin Praet
Subject: Upcoming May (2023) Community Conversation

Hello Customer Analytics Community Members,

I hope all is well! With May just kicking off, I wanted to reach out and get you excited for our May (2023) Customer Analytics Community Conversation and make you aware of a slight date change from our normally scheduled meeting time. On Tuesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM CT we’ll be joined by Jeremy Cappello, Principal Marketing Specialist, Small Business Energy Efficiency at DTE Energy who will be leading a discussion around, “Data-driven customer engagement for SMB Energy Efficiency.”

I’ll be providing more information on this session, including our Microsoft Teams credentials, one week prior to our meeting but you can always learn more about each of our upcoming Community Conversations on our Events Page HERE.

If you have any questions in the meantime please reach out to me at kpraet@utilityanalytics.com.

 

Thanks!

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Kevin Praet
Membership Coordinator
Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
Boulder CO
315-440-3033
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