An Electrification Utility Marketplace for the Future

Given our success with PG&E's EV Savings Calculator, PG&E selected us to replace their existing energy efficiency & resiliency utility marketplace. Our product proposal focused on joining Utility Programs alongside Products, improving customer relevancy & UX, and building in flexibility for continuing to add high-value future offerings.

We launched the first iteration of the product in less than six months and have since more than 2x'd their previous utility marketplace's traffic and greatly increased time-on-site and customer actions.

PG&E saw the impact potential of more clearly aligning internal programs and resources with products that could help customers achieve their energy savings, efficiency, and resiliency goals.

After in-depth research with PG&E's stakeholders, Bellawatt designed a Utility Marketplace website that provides a streamlined, holistic solution for PG&E's customers to save money, energy, and improve grid resilience. The website improved upon previous capabilities by seamlessly introducing PG&E program searchability alongside external vendor products, as well as incorporating personalization to help increase ease-of-use and desired customer action conversions.

Bellawatt offers full-service software consulting and includes every aspect of Designing, Developing, and Delivering premier software products for Enterprise with the best of startup-level speed and results. Our exceptional team of experienced energy and technology industry veterans worked closely with PG&E's internal teams and customers to design and build a new utility marketplace.

We believe the best products are built by clearly understanding and advocating for key user needs and smooth experiences while balancing business objectives. We take each of our clients through a 3-Phase Delivery process (bellawatt.com/delivery) where we lean heavily on stakeholder and user research and feedback to align on clear problems-to-solve, translate our insights into well-aligned solution Design, and then transition into Development and Delivery.

In order to build a successful utility marketplace, we conducted in-depth interviews with multiple PG&E departments to understand and align on key priorities and objectives before transitioning into solution design. To develop unique solutions, we led structured ideation sessions with relevant stakeholders to understand and map problem and opportunity areas. In the process, we applied design thinking methods with market-research-informed contextualization to provoke outside of the box ideation. We also conducted market research including customer surveying to clearly understand PG&E's customer sentiment and motivations around energy efficiency and resiliency. Our user research identified common Persona patterns in needs, motivations, goals, and pain points. These Personas were used to inform product designs and feature prioritization.

One of Bellawatt's core technical principles is delivering nimble software solutions at enterprise scale. Our product is built to be scalable and quick-to-modify. At the outset of the engagement we worked with PG&E to agree on a long-term vision for the product and then designed and architected a solution that aligns.

We believe in data-informed decision making, so we target getting to launch day as quickly as is reasonable in order to start generating insights that allow us to iteratively improve upon the product, ensuring we're generating the most value we can for customers. Since launching, we continue to improve upon the marketplace experience iteratively, informed by user feedback, product analytics, and PG&E stakeholder input.

We successfully researched, designed, developed, and launched the Marketplace in less than six months and saw immediate success in customer usage statistics. We believe in establishing long-term partnerships, and with that in mind, we continue to improve upon the Marketplace's ability to easily & relevantly inform customers about electrification opportunities while reducing their financial and operational barriers to taking action. Our results speak for themselves:

Unique Visitors: 3x previous vendor performance

Returning Users: Nearly 2x previous vendor performance

Action Conversion Rate: 4% of all visitors (compare to industry average conversions of 2-3%)

In just a few short years, we've launched similarly impactful products with energy industry leaders ranging from Sunrun and Amazon to Austin Energy and the U.S. Department of Energy. With every partnership we come closer to a more tech-friendly, efficient, and modern energy ecosystem.