Demand Response: Important today, crucial tomorrow

In the next 3 to 5 years, energy retailers will be faced with burgeoning challenges related to the management of wholesale price risk and how to meaningfully engage their customers in response. For the industry to meet 2030 goals and beyond, customers must be positioned as partners in the energy transition. Rewarding customers for managing energy usage during peak events not only mitigates wholesale risk for retailers, but also highlights the value of flexibility for customers, squarely positioning an energy brand as customer-first at a time when the cost-of-living squeeze exacerbates the challenges of the transition for all.  

Tally Behavioural Demand Response (Tally BDR) helps retailers acknowledge the cost-of-living pressures their customers face, rewarding them in the moments that matter and opening high-value digital channels for the cross-sell of solar and battery solutions that can automate load management.  

Over the past few months, we have released some key enhancements to our Tally BDR platform to better respond to the current and evolving climate, building on our rich history of innovation with both retail and network clients.

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Recent events and latest feature releases

A recent event coordinated by Tally BDR went out to 5000+ customers in Australia, and resulted in a significant load reduction of over 1.5 kWh per customer across the 2-hour period.

The success of this release can be attributed to our well-founded Tally BDR capability, coupled with several feature releases that proved impactful during the event. These enhancements included:

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• Updated Baseline methodology
  • We updated from CAISO 10:10 to the newer CAISO 5:10 to better reflect the appropriate baseline for customers. Instead of taking an average of the previous ten equivalent days (considering weekdays vs weekends and public holidays) to generate a customer’s baseline, we took an average of the five highest consumption days from that ten-day period. As a result, any recorded load reductions were a more accurate reflection of the true value of the customer’s efforts to reduce their load.

• Configurable rewards structure
  • We applied a tiered rewards structure; in this case the top 2% of kWh ‘Reducers’ were given an additional incentive to reduce their load on top of the standard baseline methodology.

• Customer eligibility filter
  • ‘Pre-washing’ customers to filter out those who were not home at the time of the event improved the customer experience by ensuring the engagement was relevant to those who received it.

• Opt-in enabled via SMS
  • Excluding customers who did not opt-in not only reduced the cost of SMS messaging and the regulatory risk associated with customer consent, but also gave customers a better experience by ensuring notifications were relevant to their participation interest.

• High-value customer targeting with configurable load setting
  • We targeted customers whose load available to shift during the proposed event timeslot met the assigned value criterion, for example targeting customers with over 1kWh available. Criteria are configurable by retailers, again supporting cost reduction and offering a more relevant user experience.

• Solar logic enabled
  • Solar customers are typically the most engaged energy users, however they are not often invited to participate in peak events. Our expert data team have configured Tally BDR so this customer segment can be incentivised to both reduce load and export energy for the duration of an event.

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Weekly engagement proven to enhance results

Our results show that when demand response messaging is weaved into an overall engagement strategy, behavioural impact can be significantly enhanced.  

Our customer experience solution, Tally Trust, provides a platform for weekly messaging to alert and remind customers of potential events, improving opt-in rates and participation. Compared with standalone messaging sent out during the event, weekly messaging results in a higher uptake of participation and churn reduction of up to 28%.

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‍The power of personalisation

An additional new feature released as part of the recent deployment was a personalised portal that allows customers to track their progress and engage more deeply with the product experience. Key features of this digital portal include:

• A customised reminder of the reward available for load shifting during the event.

• The ability for customers to click-through to see interval-by-interval performance relative to their baseline.

• A personalised, retrospective view on how they managed their load during previous events and throughout a season.

‍Enrich performance with real-time data

Tally BDR is architected to run live events where baselines are calculated on the fly and presented back to customers in real-time. Market participants able to access the necessary data through their Meter Data Provider have enriched their customers’ digital experience significantly and supported their bottom-line using Tally BDR.

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Engage customers, reduce risk

Tally BDR is one of the industry’s most advanced solutions for managing the increasingly frequent peak events faced by energy retailers in a cost-of-living crisis for their customers. While the pressures of the current climate grow for all, our philosophy of continuous improvement has built on the foundations of our longstanding BDR solution, delivering a rich, personalised and highly relevant user experience while trimming costs to serve and churn risk for retailers.

Whatever your digital platform, Tally BDR can be deployed rapidly and seamlessly with your tech stack. Talk to us about how Tally BDR can support your energy retail business – and your customers – through the energy transition and beyond.

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Find out more about Tally Behavioural Demand Response>

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