Property Data: The Future of Customer Engagement

There are a million things competing for your customers’ attention every day. From grocery ads and clothing sales to movie trailers and endless notifications, it’s hard to stick out and make an impact in a sea of distractions. Add on the constantly changing customer engagement trends and it quickly becomes hard to keep up. 

Billing or Weather Alert emails are likely to go unclicked when up against an email from a customer’s favorite store. That’s reflected in the numbers—email open rates for utilities typically range from 15% to 40%, with the industry average around 25%. You’re doing the best you can with the data you collect, but there’s more you can do. Enter property data: a game changer to better understand, engage, and serve your customers. 

Why Property Data Matters

The customer’s property is the lens to better understand energy usage, service patterns, and behaviors. However, utilities and program managers typically lack access to property data. It’s important data because it can give a completely different view of the population. It provides the context needed to get the full story—the connective tissue for customer insight. It helps detect patterns among customers. If you better understand the property, you can more accurately predict how customers will use energy. 

Property data is an underutilized differentiator. Historically, utilities collected basic data about customers’ homes and the information needed to pay bills. You have a ton of data on specific customer interactions, but it’s hard to understand how the interactions might relate to other customers. That’s because you don’t have the full picture. 

What Can Property Data Be Used For?

Picture this: your utility is developing a new HVAC rebate program and needs to promote it. Where do you even start? You might send a general email blast to your entire customer list, but with the constant competition for attention, most customers will ignore it. What if you knew who installed a new HVAC recently? Or which homes are 15+ years old and likely due for an upgrade? Property data has the answers to those questions. It enables you to be more effective in every step of your strategy from engagement to messaging and personalized program recommendations. 

Customer Engagement & Segmentation 

Property data is key to defining the parameters for how similar buildings should operate based on their features. These standards compare how homes are actually performing to their expected energy use, making it easier to see where home upgrades or behavior changes can have the biggest impact. By understanding how a property should use energy, you can more precisely target the right audience for specific messages. 

It also enables customer segmentation by identifying underserved groups or those who need different communications. You can see what’s happening in specific populations, like who’s overperforming or underperforming, to target your efforts better and be more cost effective. With property data, you can send the right message to the right customer at the right time while ensuring utilities are optimizing communication engagement and coverage across their entire territory. 

These insights also help to build and target new customer segments.  For example, property data can also help you identify that a specific neighborhood’s buildings are around 15 years old, indicating that many customers in this area are likely to need new HVAC systems in the near future. Property data just helped you find great candidates to target for your new HVAC rebate program.  

Communication & Messaging 

Property data helps build messages around real customers instead of the “average customer,” who might not actually exist. It also prevents sending irrelevant messages, such as sending HVAC upgrade opportunities to homes with brand new HVAC systems. Utilities can use property data to target and prequalify customers before sending out communications; in this case, by only targeting customers with HVAC systems that are nearing replacement age.  

Property data helps develop messaging that’s specific to a certain subset of customers. It unlocks additional information to create better conversations and experiences for your customers. It’s the next step for utility customer engagement. 

Program Recommendations 

Beyond messaging and engagement, property data identifies good candidates for programs based on specific home and consumption patterns. Based on building parameters and benchmarks comparing expected versus actual performance, you can model who might benefit from efficiency upgrades or services–like that neighborhood overdue for new HVACs – to determine how upgrades are likely to impact overall consumption and savings on the bill Recommending a program before the customer even knows they need support is powerful proactive outreach. 

If a customer isn’t ready to commit to a program, property data also enhances virtual home assessments (VHAs). When pre-populated with known information, VHAs become faster, more accurate and more engaging, leading to higher participation rates. 

How to Get Started

It may be overwhelming to think about getting started collecting and analyzing property data, but it doesn’t have to be. The good news is you can easily leverage the data you already have. Start by analyzing existing sources to build an initial layer of property data.  

From there, partners like Brillion can help expand and enrich that data. Brillion collects data from independent and unbiased sources and incorporates new data streams to deepen personalization and relevance. Property data helps with pattern recognition and relates individual behaviors to broader customer segments.  Brillion also helps utilities use property data to model energy use at the account-level, provide a segmented analysis of campaign results, and use property segmentation to strengthen program reporting and decision-making. 

Property data isn’t just about buildings. It’s the connective tissue needed to truly understand your customer’s energy use. By expanding data inputs, you can unlock the next level of customer engagement, personalization, and operational efficiency. Let’s move beyond the average customer by using property data and analysis to talk to the right customer with the right message at the right time. 

Brillion can help you take the first step. Connect with us today to see how our property data can take your customer engagement to the next level.