SCE Data Platform
Challenge: Complex, internally and externally.
Southern California Edison serves nearly 15 million customers, across all socioeconomic levels and via more than 17 languages — and they need to talk about over 30 programs related to energy usage, safety, financial assistance, outages, infrastructure enhancements and more. Historically, there had been no way to communicate with their customers in a way that understood their unique situation and needs. Very often, SCE might be delivering information on something that was no longer relevant to the person receiving it.
Additionally, their business is complex and their internal teams have specific lines of sight— which means they don’t always see their customers’ full perspectives. SCE believes their customers deserve a unified customer experience — but making that a reality wouldn’t be simple.
Insight: We needed the tech to see people as people.
We began by auditing all of their programs and offerings and building a comprehensive strategy and integrated communications plan. As part of this process, we identified a need to integrate SCE's Customer Marketing Database with a holistic Customer Data Platform (CDP) — a software solution that creates a unified customer database that is accessible by all digital channels. It unifies first and third-party data for our customers into a single, robust customer profile.
This would be beneficial to both SCE and to their customers, because it would help us better see them for the unique individuals they are. And when we communicate with them, we can be confident we’re providing value — and not, say, asking them to sign up for paperless billing when they’ve already done that. That kind of thing erodes trust and impacts SCE’s credibility.
Solution: A CDP built for the future.
The technology for truly robust customer data platforms is relatively new. Our team has deep experience and certifications in Adobe Analytics, and SCE made a business decision to create an Adobe CDP that would leverage Adobe’s Experience Platform. We began with a pilot program that focused on three communication priorities that are valuable to both SCE and their customers:
• Sign up for outage alerts
• Enroll in paperless billing
• Sign up forAutoPay
We reached our customers via email, popups, and banners on SCE.com and third-part social and display ads. But importantly, the campaign knows what people have already done and what they haven’t. And all of this communication ends once the customer has done all three tasks. Importantly, this system was built for how we’ll eventually use it — not just what we need now. We organized the data in ways that are flexible and will allow us to bring this same seamless experience across our full integrated communication strategy.
SCE’s communication will be more relevant, more valuable, and more in-sync with their brand mission.
Results
The beta effort is just about to launch, so we’ll have more detailed results to share in the near future. But the back-end work to develop the CDP will help enable and empower a wide variety of exciting initiatives over the next few years.
