The interesting work rarely arrives fully formed.
These are a few examples of what happens when you move anyway — the situation, the moment that made it urgent, what we did and what changed.
NB Power is a provincially-owned energy utility serving over 430,000 customer accounts in New Brunswick. They are technically excellent and operationally serious, but what they lacked was a granular, behavioural understanding of their customer base, how they made decisions about energy and what would genuinely shift their behaviour toward cleaner, more efficient consumption. The energy transition is happening whether NB Power is ready for it or not, and they need to get ahead of it with propositions that customers actually adopt.
The window for shaping customer behaviour around clean energy including EV charging, smart metering, heat pumps, efficient water heaters and clean energy rates was opening fast and would not stay open indefinitely. Early movers in utilities markets build the customer relationships and the brand trust that late movers have to pay a significant premium to acquire. NB Power knew this, but needed the customer insight to move with confidence rather than guesswork.
Commissioning another market research report was not the answer. They needed to understand their customers well enough to design for them
Over several engagements, we developed a deep behavioural segmentation of NB Power’s customer base built on in-depth interviews and in-home observation rather than survey data. We used those segments to drive a new proposition development process spanning clean energy rates, EV charging, smart metering, energy efficiency programmes and upgraded home services. Each proposition was tested with real customers through iterative prototype research before being committed to launch.
As importantly, we trained NB Power’s own cross-functional teams in human-centred research and prototype testing methods so that by the end of the programme, they were running their own customer insight sessions rather than waiting for us to do it for them.
Several of the propositions developed through this work have since launched commercially. Customer satisfaction has improved, as have energy efficiency outcomes improved.
NB Power now has an internal team that understands how to design for its customers, not just how to survey them. The most durable output was not any single proposition or research report, but the capability to keep finding out what customers need and acting on it.
