Developing IT-based Interactive Services For The Power Consumer

Summary

As the market pressure is going to increase in the utility industry, it presumes more effort will be put on the development of services. This paper emphasize two general problems in the development process, which services and how to design them? Through a pilot study with residential customers about utility services can this report from the ISES-project give some preliminary answers to these questions. The first indications were that the respondents in the study rated most potential services highly and they showed both a strong desire for better information from their power supplier and a need for some practical power control services.

Secondly, the pilot study also indicated a great preference differences between people concerning service complexity and control aspects. A difference, which can be costly both for the marketing precision and the customer dialogue if it not will be noticed and taken into consideration. To discover people's preferences, the project has tested a tool, the Dynamic Decision Style-model, to identify these preference differences with promising results.

At last, the paper shows how the knowledge from the pilot study has been used to build a interactive utility information service on Internet. The project worked to reach three important targets, flexibility in complexity levels, interactivity, and to build a learning system for the service provider. The overall objective was to reach a higher precision in the service development and marketing process, in order to provide the customers more value for their money.

The entire paper in PDF format.