Against climate change

Headline proposal 2: Europeans have increased their knowledge about their household energy consumption.

  • Combining personalized content with Green Euro incentives, this app translates household energy consumption data into useful energy saving information and tips tailored to the end user.
  • 46% of people who have used BENEFFICE have increased their knowledge about their home's energy consumption thanks to the App.

August 23rd, 2021.- The rise in electricity prices is skyrocketing in Europe. Germany tops the list of countries where consumers pay the most for energy in Europe, with a cost of 0.3006 euros per kWh, according to data published in April 2021 by the European statistics agency, Eurostat. For its part, Spain is in fifth place, behind Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Ireland, with a price of 0.2298 euros per kWh. This is above the Eurozone and EU average.

With these prices, responsible energy consumption at home becomes more indispensable, but how to do it? "Saving energy at home is as simple as turning off the lights when you leave a room, right? While this doesn't hurt, as we enter an era with smarter technology and greater urgency about climate change, customers need to have better tools and tips to help them create new habits and make better choices," explains Rodrigo Sanz, Senior Advise Public Funds at Euto-Funding. 

Personalized content and incentives

This is exactly what the BENEFFICE solution aims to do. Combining personalized content with Green Euro incentives, this application translates household energy consumption data into useful energy-saving information and tips tailored to the end user. For example, is your home consuming more energy this month than usual? The application will alert you to this and help you identify the cause of this trend. Is your refrigerator consuming more energy than it should? The app will help you diagnose this problem and suggest ways to optimize its performance. 

In addition to this dynamic household monitoring, the BENEFFICE app also includes an achievement badge system that rewards users for developing energy-saving habits through an experiential learning cycle. Inspired by physical activity tracking programs, BENEFFICE's energy-saving challenges use a bootstrap methodology that begins with simple onboarding and education tasks and progresses to increasingly sophisticated energy-saving recommendations that reflect the evolution of the user's state of engagement with the app and their knowledge of sustainability issues. For example, users can be challenged to answer basic questions about their typical monthly household energy consumption (and be educated on how to find this information in the app) or be rewarded for achieving multi-day streaks of sustained reductions in their home's energy consumption. 

Commitment to energy savings

These contextual recommendations and badge earning challenges are based on an innovative platform that combines attitudinal and behavioral segmentation, in-app analytics, weather forecasts and smart meter data. This allows the app to customize content based on each household's individual consumption patterns, meaning that households that are already well optimized will receive challenges that match their current habits, while others who are just starting to take steps toward energy efficiency are offered stepping stones appropriate to their level of knowledge and interest. 

The result? Ninety-four percent of users stated that the Achievement Badge challenges were motivating, 79 percent found them engaging, and 46 percent agreed that their knowledge of their home's energy consumption had increased after using the app. For energy utilities and retailers, these results suggest that customer engagement with energy savings is possible when customers are equipped with the right tools and knowledge to interpret their home energy data.