Copper Labs unlocks better data and actionable insights to increase customer satisfaction and drive deeper, more cost-effective program participation.
Copper’s customer-facing mobile app provides consumers with real-time insights into their energy, gas, and water usage. This empowers customers to make informed decisions about their consumption, participate in demand response programs, and receive customized recommendations for energy or bill savings. By delivering more personalized and timely customer messaging, our solutions help utilities improve customer satisfaction, strengthen engagement, and drive more cost-effective program outreach.
Real-time energy and water insights
The Copper mobile app provides customers with granular, timely energy consumption data directly from their meters.
Timely usage data and feedback enables consumers to see the immediate impact of turning on appliances, adjusting thermostats, or changing their usage habits, and to respond quickly to water leaks or spikes in energy use. While other energy monitors use third-party metering or sensors, resulting in usage data that might not match customer bills, Copper’s approach ensures that the customer and utility are always looking at the same data. And unlike many smart meter-based apps which can often only provide hourly or daily updates, Copper can share data as frequently as every 30 seconds. Going beyond the data, Copper’s mobile app also offers personalized, actionable insights and recommendations. For example, customers can get timely alerts about abnormal usage (such as a water leak), and receive mid-month usage reports to flag the potential for high bills and help them plan ahead for the remainder of the billing period.
Equitable customer empowerment
By making energy and water data readily accessible, Copper empowers consumers to make smarter choices, engage more directly with their utility, and identify new opportunities to save on their bills.
Copper’s mobile app and customer engagement tools help utilities empower their customers to make immediate, informed changes to their consumption while driving engagement with timely alerts and personalized insights. Its platform also provides a compelling new channel for utility messaging and outreach on a wide range of topics, from demand-side management (DSM) programs to new time-varying rates or safety tips. And because its outdoor collectors don’t rely on customer Wi-Fi networks, Copper uniquely allows utilities to more equitably engage income-qualified customers who may have internet access through their smartphones but may not have in-home Wi-Fi networks needed to support in-home devices like smart thermostats.
Improved program targeting
As utility DSM and electrification targets continue to grow, better targeting can drive improved cost-effectiveness and boost customer satisfaction.
With sophisticated and customizable filtering capabilities, Copper’s portal allows utilities to target priority or income-qualified customers, or use AI-driven algorithms to find customers with EV charging or large HVAC loads. They can then send personalized messages to drive program participation, provide education on new time-varying rates, or share other relevant information. The portal also makes it easy for electric, gas, or water utilities to create behavioral load flexibility events so customers can choose to help alleviate peak demand challenges. This approach can help utilities improve reliability and resiliency while enabling deeper decarbonization efforts, expanding customer choice, and empowering consumers with actionable data-driven insights.
Case Study: Holy Cross Energy
Electric co-op Holy Cross Energy used Copper Labs’ near-real-time data to support their deep decarbonization targets by better engaging customers and integrating distributed energy resources (DERs). Holy Cross discovered that the real-time, personalized insights provided by Copper made a big difference in customers’ behavior: Those who used Copper were twice as likely to comply with a prompt to reduce their energy usage voluntarily.