Electric Vehicles: Driving the Customer Experience
February 07, 2022
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Itron, along with ComEd, Xcel Energy, and Touchstone Energy Cooperatives, recently sponsored a Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) study on electric vehicle (EV) owners, their attitudes, and who they trust to give them accurate information on buying and operating their EVs. The full report, entitled “Electric Vehicles: Driving the Customer Experience”, is based on an online survey of 1,000 residential consumers in the United States in November 2021. That sample was boosted with an additional 750 respondents who currently own an EV.
The report highlights two key findings. First, EV owners are overwhelmingly “tech-savvy proteges” - the same consumer segment most likely to currently own or be interested in adopting smart home technology. Second, the study indicates that electric utilities have a clear and important role to play in helping customers down the path of EV adoption. From this perspective, it is clear that utilities have a distinct opportunity to build a unique and strong connection with their customers that simply wasn’t possible in a gas-powered transportation world. Furthermore, utilities that can successfully build those customer relationships will be a strong position to recruit those customers into programs to help maintain a clean, safe, and reliable grid through demand response and other customer programs.
SECC will host a webinar on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022, at 10 a.m. PST to share these and other key findings from the study, as well as a panel discussion with Nadia Mallakh, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Ventures at Xcel Energy, and Mike Ting, Senior Product Manager at Itron, to discuss their organizations respective initiatives related to EVs and transportation electrification.
Paige Schaefer is a Product Marketing Manager in Itron’s Outcomes group for the strategy, planning and implementation of projects supporting marketing functions spanning electricity, water and gas business units. She interacts directly with sales, product and corporate marketing to identify new marketing opportunities, recommend actions and the coordination of targeted campaigns to increase brand awareness and market share where she works closely with the teams to develop content and strategies. In addition, she provides website support, event coordination and manages Itron’s Energy Forecasting Group (EFG), which supports end-use data development, the Statistical End-use Approach (SAE) and coordinates their annual meeting for discussing modeling and forecasting issues. Paige has a B.S. in Business Administration from San Diego State University with an emphasis in Marketing.
