Refreshing a Residential Needs Assessment to Guide Utility Innovation
Challenge
A large electric utility was relying on a customer needs assessment that was several years old to guide customer experience and planning decisions. With the significant changes in population, technology, affordability pressures, and customer expectations, it was clear that the existing understanding of customer needs was no longer sufficient.
Leaders across the organization were investing in innovation, but efforts were fragmented and difficult to prioritize. The utility needed a clear, customer-grounded way to update their understanding of what matters most and where unmet needs represent the greatest opportunity for impact.
The utility partnered with Bellomy to refresh its residential customer needs assessment with three core goals:
- Refresh its understanding of evolving customer expectations
- Identify opportunity areas across billing, digital tools, grid investment, and communication
- Create a defensible foundation to guide innovation and investment decisions
The work was designed to move beyond satisfaction metrics and provide clarity on which needs matter most and where to focus next.
Solution
Bellomy designed a comprehensive, multi-phase research program that combined qualitative exploration with rigorous quantitative validation.
Key elements of the approach included:
- Mining existing research and industry trends to surface emerging needs and validate known pain points
- Conducting in-depth interviews with customers to explore expectations, pain points, and language in customers’ own words
- Refining and validating a comprehensive list of customer needs through a pre-test survey
- Launching a large-scale quantitative survey to measure both the importance of each need and perceived performance, using a forced-choice prioritization approach to produce a clear, rank-ordered view of customer priorities across customer groups
- Mapping importance versus performance to identify opportunity areas (i.e., needs that were highly important to customers but underperforming in delivery)
- Facilitating an in-person activation workshop to help internal stakeholders internalize the findings and begin translating insight into action
At the center of the analysis was importance versus performance mapping, which translated insight into prioritization. Each customer need was evaluated based on how important it was and how well the utility was perceived to be meeting it.
This framework revealed where the utility was performing well on foundational expectations, such as reliability, and where meaningful gaps existed. High-importance, lower-performance needs surfaced as clear opportunity areas, including themes related to affordability, transparency, and future readiness.
Because the analysis was conducted by customer sub-groups, the utility gained a nuanced view of where needs diverged across its customer base. The result was not a long list of issues, but a focused set of priority opportunities where improvement would deliver the greatest customer impact.
Results
To ensure insights translated into action, Bellomy facilitated an in-person activation workshop.
The session brought together cross-functional teams from across the organization to align around the findings and apply them directly to their work. Using structured, collaborative exercises, teams explored high-priority unmet needs and developed initial ideas grounded in customer insight.
The workshop helped shift the conversation from debating opinions to aligning around evidence, creating shared ownership and momentum toward action.
The refreshed needs assessment delivered immediate and lasting value:
- Clear visibility into where innovation would deliver the greatest customer impact
- Alignment across stakeholders on what mattered most for unique audiences
- A foundation for activation workshops focused on prioritization
- A practical, defensible framework to guide innovation planning
- A clear, current understanding of what matters most to residential customers
By grounding innovation in a disciplined understanding of customer needs and pairing insight with activation, the utility moved from fragmented ideas to intentional progress. The work continues to inform cross-functional planning and serves as a durable framework for future decision-making.
Want results?
Contact us to start leveraging Bellomy's expertise for your research.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your details will be held in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
