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Comverge's client base includes a wide range of corporations, cooperatives, and municipalities: from small Coops serving a few thousand up to IOU giants serving millions. Few industries have such an array of organizations all striving to achieve the same goal: providing reliable, cost-effective electricity to people all over the country, the continent, and the world.
One of Comverge's goals within Customer Intimacy is to bring those clients together to discuss and determine best practices for implementing successful programs. "There is so much insight to be gained by utilities talking to each other. Unfortunately, deregulation has done a lot to put utilities on edge about sharing too much information," said Scott Mossbrooks, Sales Director for the Southeastern US. "When it's possible to open those lines of communication, both the utility and the end-consumer benefit a great deal from the knowledge shared and best practices established thereby."
When Tampa Electric Co. raised an interest in price-responsive load control, Comverge quickly phoned over to Tampa Electric's northern "neighbor" in Pensacola, FL, Gulf Power. Comverge and Gulf have worked closely throughout the implementation of Gulf's fully-price responsive rate program, GoodCents Select. Gulf has always been willing to open their program to other utilities considering the option, holding seminars at their facilities and making rate charts and impact results available for building business cases. |
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In Tampa Electric's case, Gulf went even further, providing Tampa Electric with the statistics for passing the business case through the Florida PUC, the tools for interfacing this program with other CRM and billing tools, and one-on-one team support. Beginning with Howard Bryant of Tampa Electric and Margaret Neyman of Gulf, the two utilities actually lined up the project management teams by role and arranged one-on-one meetings between the staff to discuss ideas, responsibilities, and lessons learned.
This close interaction allowed Tampa Electric to accelerate the pilot from PUC approval in late February to beginning installations in May. Gulf Power even leant several of Comverge's talented installers to Tampa Electric for the installment phase of the 250 point pilot. Nearing the end of the installment phase, Tampa Electric expects to begin operating the system next month.
This success with which this program was implemented is itself a lesson learned: cooperation and communication between utilities go a long way towards implementing new initiatives more quickly, more cost-effectively, and with better end-results. Comverge continues to make this important step a priority in achieving Customer Intimacy - through events like Advance and networking receptions at major trade shows and on a project-by-project basis with each and every client.
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