Insights from Competitive Industries
Ahmad Faruqui is a principal with The Brattle Group. He has worked for more than 140 clients on five continents and authored more than a hundred articles, papers, and books on energy economics.
Henna Trewn is a research analyst with The Brattle Group. She supports utilities, energy companies, and government organizations across North America, Europe, and Australia on ratemaking methodology, renewable finance, market development, rate design, and business risk.
Customer research has a long tradition in the utility industry. Today, the utility toolkit includes surveys to solicit items such as demographic and appliance ownership information.
The toolkit also attempts to assess customer satisfaction through focus groups in order to discuss new product or service introductions and by scheduling one-on-one interviews with large customers on selected issues such as power quality and economic development rates. Yet each of these methods relies on asking customers to articulate their needs.
Gary Hammel, co-author of "Competing for the Future," noted in the 2015 Harvard Business Review article, "The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company," that asking customers what they want does not yield new insights.
"Instead, you have to observe them, up close and over time, and then reflect on what you've learned. Where are we creating needless frustrations?
Where are we wasting our customers' time?