During COVID-19, electric, gas, and water utilities have the unique opportunity to improve how they engage with customers in a more personal and proactive way. Utilities can use quantitative and qualitative data to understand their customers as distinct individuals—or as an audience of one—and predict which actions they’ll take. This strategy can help utilities save operational costs, while simultaneously hitting targets for clean-energy initiatives.

Although virtual, this year’s E Source Forum was still a huge success. We featured 27 sessions across two days and four themes: postpandemic recovery, decarbonization, utility of the future, and serving vulnerable communities.

We compiled the 10 most-attended sessions from this year’s event. You can check out the session recordings below and find key takeaways for all 10. If you registered for the 2020 E Source Forum, you can access all session recordings and presentations through the event page.

For more than a decade, E Source has been collaborating with utilities to conduct business customer satisfaction surveys. This year E Source identified three main attributes that business customers consider most important for utilities to possess: Reliability was identified as the most important, followed closely by trustworthiness and effective emergency communications.

E Source, a data science company and leading provider of customer-focused research, data science services, and consulting for utilities and cities, will be hosting a free webinar for utilities on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. EST: Data-driven vegetation management boosts reliability and reduces costs for utilities.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential to help utilities meet carbon-reduction goals, increase revenues, and position themselves as trusted energy advisers. But that all depends on whether customers buy EVs. Currently, less than 3% of households own an EV, and customer awareness of EVs hasn’t grown much in recent years. The EV industry is at risk of declining.

E Source, the leading provider of customer-focused research, data science services, and consulting for utilities and cities, continues to expand its offerings with a new suite of machine-learning tools under the E Source OneInform^TM product line.