Oracle Utilities Opower Innovations Help Utilities Connect with Every Customer

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Oracle Utilities Opower customer engagement platform now includes four entirely new experiences and over 100 innovations for utilities to connect with every residential customer. These enhancements deliver measurable results at scale: cost-effective energy savings, satisfied customers, lower service costs, new revenue streams, and more connected homes.

"With the rise in dynamic rates, complex bills, and consumer technology on the grid edge, serving the diverse needs of today's utility customers is becoming increasingly complex," said Dan Byrnes, SVP of product development, Oracle Utilities. "Point solutions only serve small pockets of customers. With the latest release of the Opower platform, utilities can connect with every customer to increase engagement and satisfaction, drive down service costs, and balance demand on the grid."

Since breaking onto the scene more than a decade ago, the Opower platform has continued to stand as the most complete and effective customer engagement platform in the utility industry. This latest release expands Opower even further with four new digital customer experiences. Each new offering leverages machine learning to render actionable energy insights, and experimental program design to deliver measurable results.

"Oracle's latest improvements to its Opower platform demonstrate the company's ability to continue distinguishing itself as a leader in home energy management, as well as its commitment to innovation and helping customers achieve savings as scale," says Paige Leuschner, research analyst at Navigant Research.

The new experiences include:

• Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Customer Engagement: self-service customer web tools and alerts to help utilities effectively serve customers with distributed energy resources such as solar. To learn more, see today's release.
• Behavioral Load Shaping: a personalized, digital experience that enables utility customers on dynamic rates to shift their energy use away from daily peaks and control their complex bills.
• Digital Self Service Transactions: a suite of embeddable web and mobile features for utility customers to start service, pay their bills and manage their accounts, all natively integrated with Oracle Utilities' market-leading customer information system (CIS).
• AMI Customer Education Reports: multi-channel reports to educate and engage utility customers during a smart meter rollout, with new insights and recommendations for managing their energy use.

This release also includes more than 100 new features to amplify demand side management and customer care results, including:

• Adaptive Intelligent Recommendations: Opower recommendations learn and adapt to each customer's disaggregated end use and cross-channel engagement patterns. An expanded library of recommendations can influence over 4 TWh of energy-saving behavior every year and create a halo effect of 15 percent more participation in utility programs.
• Digital Energy Reports: Email Home Energy Reports have been upgraded with a dozen behavioral insight modules and new configurable content options to make them more dynamic and feature-rich than paper reports.
• Embedded Web 2.0 Insights: Visual energy insights for utility web and mobile apps now render with more speed, reliability, and styling control than ever before to improve time on site by 25 percent.
• Unauthenticated Online Audits: Frictionless online audits allow customers to securely access the Opower audit with a single tap or click and potentially double their behavioral energy savings.
• Dynamic Campaigns: Platform tools to rapidly curate targeted marketing across the Opower experience and drive adoption of utility programs and products—such as connected home devices—at up to a 61 percent higher rate than traditional and digital advertising.
• Proactive Billing Alerts: With new weather insights, dual fuel support, and customer-set budget goals, these upgraded alerts deliver digital energy savings and reduce high bill calls by up to 22 percent.
• Connected Home and Enterprise Integrations: Mature APIs and a growing library of integrations into Oracle customer, meter, and marketing applications and third-party connected home platforms make it easy to plug Opower into core utility operations, engage customers through digital assistants, and enable smart home device control.

"Customers trust their utility for advice how to: save energy, control their bills, adopt new technologies and use them well. With these new innovations, we're helping utilities connect it all for their customers," said Byrnes. "And we're just getting started."

Additional Resources

• Oracle Utilities Opower Energy Efficiency
• Oracle Utilities Opower Digital Self Service
• Oracle Utilities Opower Proactive Alerts
• Follow us on Twitter and the Oracle Utilities blog

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