Australia's Origin Energy Selects Consumer Engagement Technology

June 9, 2011
Tendril has been selected by Origin Energy, an Australian integrated energy company, to deliver consumer engagement technology to Origin’s customer base in Australia.

Tendril has been selected by Origin Energy, an Australian integrated energy company, to deliver consumer engagement technology to Origin’s customer base in Australia.

Origin will deploy Tendril Energize—an application suite that provides energy service providers with a turnkey solution to deliver simple, easy-to-use tools to engage customers in energy efficiency and accelerate consumer participation in new programs, pricing and active home energy management. The companies will begin a pilot of the service in thousands of Origin customer homes in the second half of 2011 with potential for mass distribution to nearly 5 million households.

The Energize suite is built on Tendril Connect, an open standards-based, scalable, secure software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that enables energy insight, choice and control across various communication channels to customers, including web, mobile, paper, home area network (HAN) devices and advanced application development for future programs such as solar, smart appliances and electric vehicles.

Origin recently launched the 2011 Origin Index, a national survey on Australians’ attitudes toward energy and the environment. The survey found that Australians are confused about the impact they can have on their bills and the environment, with 93 percent stating they wanted to be more focused on implementing sustainable solutions in the home, while over half of those surveyed struggled to make the correlation between behavioral changes and their impact on the environment. Tendril Energize will help customers understand the impact their energy consumption is having on the environment as well as their bills.

Based on field research and design methodology grounded in behavioral and cognitive psychology, Tendril Energize has the capacity to provide an active learning environment where consumers can set energy savings goals, measure progress toward those goals, and share their experience online with experts and other consumers. Tendril Energize provides energy consumers with unprecedented visibility into energy usage, personalized estimates of monthly energy bills and the ability to control household consumption to meet individual needs.

By engaging consumers in active home energy management, Tendril Energize helps energy service providers like Origin increase consumer satisfaction and reduce churn by enabling them to target compelling new products and services according to an individual consumer’s habits, preferences and needs—accelerating value to the consumer as well as opening up new revenue streams for the energy service provider. In addition, energy service providers have the ability to leverage the captured consumer data for demand forecasting, the measurement and verification of energy efficiency programs, and demand response event participation.

Origin is Australia’s largest energy retailer with 4.6 million customer accounts, and the leading green energy retailer with more than 500,000 GreenPower and Green Gas accounts. Origin is committed to helping its customers on their sustainability journey by providing the best products and services to better manage their energy usage and reduce their environmental impact. Having already piloted wave-one technologies such as in-home displays, Origin hopes that its partnership with Tendril will provide full smart home solutions that will assist customers in better managing their energy consumption and power bills.

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