Captain Obvious

As I reflect on my career in the Energy Utility business, I remember how many times customers became angry because they didn’t have choices.  Some wanted to choose their supplier thinking that shopping for electricity would give them lower costs.  Most now agree that this didn’t prove to be true.  Yes, there might have been times when they had lower cost choices, but they generally had to learn to live with volatility in prices.  They liked the low-price times but not the high price times.

Many thought that offering customers rate choices would be better and would make them happy.  That led to the creation of time-of-use, critical peak pricing, and ultimately real time pricing.  Some were delighted, but most found they didn’t know how to make the best choice for their situation.  For many who didn’t understand their hour-by-hour use of electricity, these choices were daunting.

The purists then came up with online energy information systems assuming customers wanted to exercise choice, but once again found that most would not spend the time to understand their choices.

All of this is a lead up to a recent email I received from A&T offering me lots of choices.  Take a close look at this graphic and see that each choice required me to talk to a different branch of AT&T.  That may make sense to many of you because you know how complex choices are in these areas.

But the underlying assumption is that I want that level of choice. I am a tech savvy person; however, I have no idea which of these choices I want to exercise.  AT&T is assuming two things: first that I can choose and that I really want to talk to so many different people.  I don’t.

What’s worse, AT&T now has fractured their customer service response the same way on just about everything and anything.  You call what you think is the customer help line and find out that there is another phone number you must call to get help.   Making matters worse, you waited half an hour in the queue only to find that out. And worse yet, you couldn’t understand what the person one the other end of the call said because that person does not speak English.

No, we don’t want that level of choice.  We want to call an agent for AT&T who can navigate all our needs.  That is the key.  The word agent.  An agent is a person who is empowered to act on behalf of another.  Empowered … wow … someone who has the power to help you.

I wish we had that choice with AT&T.  Other companies seem to manage this well, for instance we have found agents with American Express and Vivant home security profoundly helpful.  They are knowledgeable, reachable, helpful, and speak clearly in English.

The result?  We have been working diligently to get AT&T out of our lives, which is a choice that we clearly understand!

I wondered when people would put the brakes on the progressive nonsense on things like banning natural gas in residential and commercial buildings. It seemed like I was the only one who did the math and declared it insane. I was surprised that the DOE, who not very long ago waged a war on using electricity in homes, had switched their position. Oh … wait a minute … shouldn’t our national research organization simply let the chips fall where they may?

A recent report from New York State does a masterful job of setting these questions back on solid footing: NY’s Electric-Heat Push Faces Cold Reality: Report – Empire Center for Public Policy

This report has a huge amount of carefully curated data that we all should consider. Everyone outside of the Northeast thinks New Yorkers all live in high rise apartments. This report shows the diversity of New York State and its residents. But, even with all this detail and diversity they come to this summary:

In Cold Reality: The Cost and Challenge of Compulsory Home Electrification in New York, Empire Center fellow James Hanley looks at the state’s plan to prohibit homeowners from replacing gas and oil furnaces after 2029 and for them to instead install heat pumps. Homeowners, he explains, face both higher equipment costs and potentially high weatherization costs to accommodate heat pumps, which can operate at lower monthly costs but require better insulation.

Even with extensive state and federal subsidies, Hanley warns, the upfront price-tag of heat pumps and weatherization will likely push homeowners to instead buy low-cost but energy-hungry electric furnaces that will put considerably greater stress on the electric grid—making the state’s overall electrification goals harder to reach.

“This is the fundamental problem at the heart of New York’s command-and-control attempt to restructure its economy to make what amount to barely detectable reductions in global emissions,” said Hanley. “Albany can ban things, but it can’t control how people replace them.”

The simple fact remains. We have a huge job of public education ahead of us, especially for politicians, legislators, and everyone in the news media. They are leading us off the cliff for sure. If we are going to solve the long-term energy and climate questions, we need to move past seemingly simple answers that simply will not work.

It seems so logical to assume that tackling major issues should cause good people to work together? How can anyone argue with that? You can’t … until and unless you consider reactions from others. You would think it is obvious that there is another profound truth these coalitions ignore … what will devious people do who see that coalition competing with their devious contrary ideas?

The conflict in the middle east is a profound example. Leaders of both sides may reach some agreement but factions within or without their “parties” see the negotiations themselves as a threat to their agendas. As a result, they violate the agreement’s intents and thereby defeat the peace process.

Think about it, an even more subtle example from recent history. Cigarette companies initially fought the scientific evidence that their product harmed people. They hired lobbyists and bought their own research studies refuting what almost anyone would have known. Cigarettes were bad …even with filters. That stall tactic worked for years, perhaps decades.

But once the cigarette company leaderships knew the jig was up, they formed coalitions with seeming competitors (vaping startups) to buy time to figure out whether their business models would scale and agreed to use public education to stop people from smoking. It was an obvious ruse. They labeled their products indicating they were bad for us. But they kept making them. They bought up or started their own e-cigarette aka vaping companies once it was clear that people who stopped smoking were indeed now using these ideas.

The energy utility industry has a parallel. When Edison commercialized electric light, the natural gas industry that had been providing energy for light at the time saw his invention as a competitor to the use of natural gas for light. What did they do? They decided to back Edison’s commercialization.

As we go through yet another cycle of national politics and one promising to continue to include many very expensive solutions to the claimed climate emergency, watch how the players position themselves. There are so many nonsensical and whimsical ideas in the mix: air capture, hydrogen, banning ICE, banning natural gas in new home and business construction, and even fusion reactors.

You will hear claims similar to Edison: this or that is dead … to be replaced by that or this. You will see seemingly amazing startups similar to the way cryptocurrency took the headlines for a time. There is another clue here. Do you know what cryptography is? It is the technique of obfuscating or coding data, ensuring that only the person who is meant to see the information–and has the key to break the code.

It is the deliberate attempt to keep anyone but those who are “in on the secrets” from profiting from the situations at hand. What seems like a coalition is in fact a deep conspiracy.

Be afraid … be very afraid!

We all know the story of Chicken Little  Maybe you remember the original name: “Henny Penny” and sometimes as “Chicken Licken.”  It is a European folk tale about a chicken who believes that the world is coming to an end. The phrase “The sky is falling!” is used a lot in the hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.

I am sure you have noticed the climate alarmism escalation over the past few years. The result has been an enormous expenditure of our money under the assumption it was going to keep us away from certain disaster.  And, since all this money has done virtually nothing to improve the situation, the chickens have come home to roost … pun intended.

Take a look at this recent Pew Research.  Notice the continued erosion of public trust and confidence in the alarmists.  What does this tell us about our future?

For one thing, we are losing faith in their advice and recommendations.  A second less obvious characteristic is that we are increasingly less likely to believe the next things they will tell us.

I used to call this carpal tunnel marketing syndrome. Repetitive stress and irritation of small passages in our bones through which tendons and nerves exist become inflamed and stop working well.  In like manner, the repeated alarmist calls are narrowing the communication channels so necessary for public service communications.

Said very simply, we are increasingly tuning them out.  So … all you alarmists … you should be taking note.  We are losing our faith in you.

Your immediate reaction was to assume I was referring once again to Artificial Intelligence, right?  Some who know me well think I am referring to Arrogance and Ignorance, which describes all too many today who are telling us what to believe, say, and do.  Nope, wrong on both counts.  I have concluded that AI stands for Automated Imitation.

My blog a few weeks ago illustrated the problem with deep fakes, and it is going to be a very big problem for all of us.  This week I want to address how I believe AI will change the energy utility business, specifically as it relates to customer service and marketing.  That is where Automated Imitation can be implemented safely.  For example, if you have excellent CSRs and were to digitally capture the incoming conversations and questions and how your best CSRs answer them, you can automate excellence into operations.

Think about how dangerous it would be for someone outside your organization to claim to have a model that could do that for you, even if it was built on excellence at another energy utility?  Do they have the same programs, services, rate structures, policies, procedures, management objectives, etc.

Do you now see the clear difference between a “black box” model where public information is dumped into huge data lakes with the hope that a miracle will happen when you apply large language models to it.  Right!  Garbage in … garbage out!

This should be obvious if you go back to the basics of the Turing Test … can the computer become so like a human that you believe you are communicating with one?

I still remember one customer who responded to our online energy analysis with a comment in our Feedback link.  It was about 6:00 a.m. on Easter Sunday and I saw it come into my email because I monitor all customers’ questions as a way of improving our applications by knowing what confuses users.  I responded trying to be helpful.  The customer assumed it was an automated response and responded with a nasty comment.  I then typed that I was not a computer and was truly trying to help.  The interactions grew more intense but eventually the customer realized I was a real person trying to help her.  Realizing that, she gushed, “I am so impressed someone at my utility is trying to help me at this hour on Sunday morning, who is your supervisor I should thank?”  Of course, I don’t work at the utility, our company just provides the online tools designed to help customers understand and analyze their energy use, so I said, “I guess my wife who runs our company.”  We still laugh together about that one.

Many utilities have already been implementing chatbots as alternatives to a live call, and they do work for many situations where the question is a common one.  Just remember this one basic tenet of all good communication.  Don’t attempt to answer a question until and unless you have verified the intent of the question in the first place.  Let me illustrate this with an actual example.

A commercial rep with the local utility asks the pastor of a new church nearing completion when he’d like service is scheduled.   He assumed the pastor knew the intent was to schedule electric service to the building once they were ready to energize it.

Quite predictably, the pastor recited the service times as 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, and 6:00 Sunday and Wednesday evenings.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery if and when excellence is embedded in the automation.