How Utilities Build Trust With Customers Who Are Struggling

Episode Description: 

What does it actually take for a utility to build trust with customers who are struggling to pay their bills? In this episode of Experience Better: The CX Podcast by KUBRA, we're sharing highlights from our recent webinar, "Supporting Vulnerable Utility Customers in Moments of Need," presented with our friends at Chartwell and featuring KUBRA's own Tara Mondelli alongside Chartwell's Casey Collins and Pat Ricks. Hear why financial vulnerability now reaches well beyond a small segment of customers, learn about the four moments that shape customer trust, and find out what utility leaders say works best, from understanding the whole household to partnering with trusted community organizations.

Whether you're just starting to rethink how you support customers who are struggling or already building out your approach, this episode offers practical ideas to help you do it while keeping the customer experience front and center.

Listen to the full podcast episode or read the detailed transcript below.  

Episode Transcript:

The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the original content and intent of the speakers.

Podcast Recap: Supporting Vulnerable Utility Customers in Moments of Need 

Cali Johnston:

Welcome, everyone, to Experience Better: the CX Podcast by KUBRA. I’m your guest host today, Cali Johnston, Sr. Product Marketing Manager here at KUBRA, and today's episode is a recap of a webinar we recently hosted with our friends at Chartwell, all about "Supporting Vulnerable Utility Customers in Moments of Need."

The webinar opened with a quick scene I want to repeat here. It's the end of the month, and a customer opens their utility bill and pauses, wondering how they're going to cover it. That moment is easy to miss, but it sets off a chain of events for the utility, from calls to the contact center to late payments. Today, we'll look at what utilities can do to support customers in that moment. 

In this podcast, you’re going to hear clips from three speakers. Tara Mondelli, Vice President of Client Success here at KUBRA, sets the stage. Casey Collins of Chartwell shares findings from Chartwell's 2025 Consumer Survey, including how customers learn about assistance, how they want to hear from their utility, and how they pay and manage their accounts. And Pat Ricks, who leads Chartwell's Vulnerable Customer Leadership Council, talks about what utility leaders across the industry are finding effective.

So I'll pull highlights from each of them and add a few thoughts along the way. First up is Tara, who walks through what customers in the US and Canada are dealing with right now when it comes to affordability.

How Widespread Is Financial Vulnerability Among Utility Customers? 

Tara Mondelli:

So the consumer reality of today is that vulnerability is expanding beyond traditional segments. So let's get into the pressures beyond today's moment of need.

So discussions about affordability are growing ladder, and it's for good reason.

Across the country, more Americans are struggling to keep up.

• 31% frequently worry about how they will pay for their utility bills.
• 38% say their household economic situation has worsened over the past twelve months.
• And one in six American families is behind on utility bills. Financial vulnerability is no longer a problem impacting a fringe segment of the population.

It's a growing fluid majority.

Most of our data today will be focused on the US market, but the truth is, Canadians are facing similar challenges.

• One in seven Canadian households cut back on basic needs to pay their energy bill.
• According to the data, nearly two million Canadian households experience energy poverty.
• 14% of households report keeping their dwelling at unsafe or uncomfortable temperatures because heating or cooling costs are unaffordable.

So a new era is dawning, one where customer confidence is shaped in everyday moments rather than rebuilt after customers fall behind.

Utilities are at a defining point in their customer relationship as more Americans face increased financial strain.

And yet 69% of customers don't believe utilities are doing enough to help the less fortunate pay their bills. As vulnerability becomes more dynamic and situational, exceptions for proactive support are rising. Affordability has shifted from a customer issue to a cost-to-serve issue, affecting every department requiring a coordinated cross-functional response.

The Four Trust-Defining Moments for Utility Customers 

Cali Johnston:

It’s so easy to think of vulnerable customers as a defined group, but the way Tara describes it, vulnerability is situational, and almost anyone can end up there depending on what's happening in their household that month. For a utility, that means a fixed list of customers to reach out to won't cover everyone who needs help.

The other idea I'd hold onto is that affordability reaches every department. When a customer struggles with a bill, it can turn into a longer call in the contact center, a payment that lands later than the forecast expected, extra manual work to set up a payment plan, and more pressure on the systems behind all of it. It takes teams working together to respond, and it also gives utilities a chance to build confidence through everyday interactions, before a customer has fallen behind.

Those everyday interactions are what Casey Collins from Chartwell focuses on. She organized Chartwell's research around four of them, which she calls trust-defining moments: 

1. Awareness
2. Communication
3. Payment
4. Self-service 

Awareness is whether customers know what help is available. Communication is whether messaging reaches them consistently and on time. Payment is how flexible the experience is to actually stay on top of payments. Self-service is how easy it is for customers to handle things on their own.

Casey covers the first two, awareness and communication, in the next clip. Here's Casey Collins from Chartwell.

Awareness and Communication: Do Customers Know Help Exists? 

Casey Collins:

So, among the respondents to Chartwell's 2025 Consumer Survey, those who had a household income of less than fifty thousand dollars, around 40% were unaware of any assistance programs offered by their utility.

Around 32% are aware of energy efficiency programs, but told us in 2024 that they did not participate in those programs offered.

And when we looked into the why, some of the challenges included uncertainty of the cost savings benefit, or they were unsure how to enroll.

And in 2025, approximately 41% of respondents reported a lack of awareness of utility energy efficiency programs. So, based on that correlation between energy efficiency and demand side management offerings when it comes to the consumer perspective, we can say that they're similarly unaware of these offerings across the board.

So let's turn now to communication.

Around 53% of consumers have indicated a preference to receive utility messages via email.

When it comes to on-bill messages, there may be lingering concerns, as data suggests that around 51% of consumers only sometimes read messages printed directly on their utility bill.

We can also see that around 22% of customers prefer to receive messages through a bill insert. So if that's not resonating with some groups of customers, what else are utilities doing to improve those gaps?

They're looking for high-impact touch points to build meaningful customer connections. We keep hearing from utilities that email is effective, but so is one-on-one engagement. And this is something that has really struck a chord within Chartwell's vulnerable customer leadership council, which Pat leads, and will speak to some of the learnings from that group as well.

But what that might look like is showing up to county or community fairs and having a presence at neighborhood gatherings. The conversation goes at a different pace and takes on a more empathetic, natural approach when face-to-face with the customer.

Cali Johnston:

Two things stood out to me in that section. The first is that awareness is a bigger hurdle than it might look. Casey shared that some customers weren't sure a program would actually save them money, and others didn't know how to enroll. So a program existing is only the starting point. Customers also need to understand what it would mean for them and what the first step looks like.

The second is how much the channel shapes the conversation. Email, bill messages, and inserts each reach people differently, and no single one will work for everyone. When Casey described showing up at community fairs and neighborhood gatherings, she said the conversation goes at a different pace and feels more empathetic. That's hard to get from a printed message. 

Once customers know help exists, they also need to be able to act on it, whether that's paying a bill or managing their account. That's what Casey turns to next, with the other two moments, payment and self-service. 

Payment and Self-Service: What Do Customers Prefer? 

Casey Collins:

So when it comes to payment and building trust in this recurring opportunity, KUBRA data indicates that around 19% of customers felt that offering digital wallets would increase trust and confidence.

Around 61% of consumers who use PayPal most often use it for bill payments.

32% of consumers stated that using digital wallets would help them to make payments on time.

Finally, let's turn our attention to self-service, which we know is hugely important to consumers in general, and especially those who are seeking empowerment and how they interact with the utility. So around 77% of website users found the web an easy channel to use to contact their power company. And this was the easiest channel to use overall, per results from Chartwell's 2025 Consumer Survey.

Not very far behind that, though, at 74% was the mobile app. So 74% of these users found it easy to use the mobile app to contact their utility company.

And then finally, we see data suggest that around 70% of customers prefer digital self-service for payments and account-related tasks, so critically important for those tasks specifically.

Digital channels overall continue to make strides in customer preference and relative ease of use, resulting in a more satisfying customer experience and increasingly better self-service.

Cali Johnston:

Casey ended her section by sharing how you can turn those four moments into action, and her advice is to always think in terms of moments rather than only in programs. For each moment, the question becomes, what does the utility need to put in place to support the customer at that point? Casey calls this the enablement focus, and I’ll summarize how she describes it for each of the four.

1. For awareness, the focus should be on coordinated visibility. That means real-time account insight across departments, using data to identify customers who are late but willing to pay, and reaching out early in a way that doesn't escalate the situation.

2. For communication, the focus should be on cross-channel alignment. Messaging needs to stay consistent across print and electronic billing, email, text, and the IVR phone channel. You can also consider suppression logic that keeps customers from receiving conflicting outreach, and proactive notifications that get ahead of potential spikes in inbound calls.

3. For payment, she points to flexibility and real-time confirmation. Payments should post immediately and get confirmed in customer accounts and in the utility's systems, payment channels connect smoothly with the billing platform, and everyone can see where a payment stands.

4. And for self-service, the focus is on workflow integration. That looks like digital pathways that take a customer from a notice straight to an action, payment plans and extensions built into the experience, and automation for routine tasks.

What Are the Five Pillars of an Affordable Service Strategy? 

Cali Johnston: 

Now let's turn to Pat Ricks, who leads Chartwell's Vulnerable Customer Leadership Council. This council brings together utility leaders from across the industry to discuss best practices and strategies for addressing affordability, and it’s fantastic that Chartwell does this. And out of that work came five pillars to focus on when providing affordable service. 

1. Identification
2. Engagement
3. Payment and credit
4. Assistance resources
5. Cultural and language

In this clip, Pat walks through the practices that other utility leaders found most effective within each pillar.

Pat Ricks:

But if you look at the identification column, you'll see that using predictive analytics, energy burden analysis, or data sharing, or data matching, those things really rise to the top when it comes to things that really make progress from an identification standpoint.

Under the engagement pillar, we see leveraging and building relationships with community-based organizations and streamlining enrollment journeys as key things that utilities are doing. And when you transition over to the payment and credit pillar, you see that using percentage of income plans and load-limited technologies as credit offers are key when it comes to making progress there.

Finally, going back to partnerships and ensuring you have multilingual, multicultural partnerships to help you understand and work within and around cultural and language barriers were very notable when it came to cultural and language barriers. And I want to go back to the assistance resources. That single point is one of my favorite things. That single point of assistance, access, services, and technologies is key.

Cali Johnston:

Pat then looked behind these pillars at what it takes to build a Best-In-Class Vulnerable Customer Strategy for your own utility, and it begins with a deep understanding of what vulnerable customers are facing. He describes it as having kitchen table conversations with customers to learn what's affecting their lives. Many utilities approach customers through the transaction, meaning how the customer's dealings with the utility are going. Pat's view is that it takes more than that, and that you need to understand the whole household and all of the bills in it.

He calls the approach most utilities use the traditional model, and in his opinion, it's a one-size-fits-all model that falls short for vulnerable customers. It relies on demographic data from the customer information system, transactional data, and, in some cases energy burden analysis, along with research like phone surveys, net promoter score, focus groups, and online surveys. He's clear that these are all good places to start, but he asks whether they're enough. His answer is that utilities may need to learn more from their customers to improve their strategy for vulnerable customers and the journey they offer.

What Pat and the council have seen is that the utilities with the strongest results use what he calls the enhanced model. In the next clip, he explains what that means.

Traditional Model vs. Enhanced Model for Vulnerable Customer Strategy 

Pat Ricks:

The model I'm talking about requires a substantial resource investment and commitment, flexibility, and a willingness to go way beyond tradition. From a customer research standpoint, this enhanced model centers on the use of in-depth interviews or, quite frankly, lifestyle dialogue, if you will, about customers and the customers' overall household challenges. All of the bills, not just the utility bill, and not just their interaction with the utility.

But we don't stop there.

We need to do a comprehensive view of the customers from the voice of the customer, but also from that of those who have a trusted relationship with the customer. To do this, we need to turn to those key third parties, there it is again, third parties, to talk about and learn and engage them in the process.

In addition, what some utilities have done, I know the utility I used to work for, Entergy, we even brought in vendors and community leaders in the process here to help learn and really help us round out what those challenges are and what the potential solutions are for some of those challenges. 

Our enhanced model here pushes the boundary and requires the utility to share a little bit more than maybe what you've shared in the past with some of these key stakeholders.

Cali Johnston:

What I like about this part is that Pat treats the people closest to the customer as real partners. A utility's own data can tell a lot, but the organizations and people who already have a customer's trust often see parts of that customer's situation that a billing system or a survey can't. Pat asks utilities to share more with these partners than they may be used to, so the partners understand how the utility and its customers interact. That openness is what makes the relationship useful to both sides.

Next, Pat explains the next phases of the “Enhanced Model,” particularly keeping those stakeholders involved while solutions are designed and implemented. 

Pat Ricks: 

From there, we remained engaged with our key stakeholders to start the solution design process. Again, we don't just go off in a conference room as utility leaders and say, okay, these solutions work, let's put them together and let's offer them, let's build business cases around What we're recommending here is that the stakeholder group stays with you through the process and helps you develop those business cases as much as they can contribute to the process.

And this brings us to the implementation phase here. Here is where we often see utilities get a little bit off track and perhaps not go to the full end of the field. And of course, there's a lot of internal work that needs to be done here, but don't leave out again, as stakeholder partnerships can help you in the implementation phase. They can help you with promoting solutions, they can help you with regulatory interaction, and they can help you by providing that early post-implementation feedback and that feedback that they're getting from your customers and their constituents.

And by keeping these stakeholder groups informed and connected, they will have a sense of ownership in the process and the success, and work with you to ensure that the success cannot only benefit you, but also benefit them as well.

More Takeaways and Where to Find the Full Webinar 

Cali Johnston:

That's our recap of the webinar, and I want to come back to where we started: a customer opens their bill and pauses. What a utility does in that moment, and in the moments around it, shapes whether that customer trusts the utility to support them in their time of need. 

If you'd like to go deeper, the full webinar covers a lot more. Tara breaks down what affordability means for CX leaders, finance leaders, operations leaders, and IT leaders, with takeaways for each. She also closes with quick wins that any utility can start on now, like making payment plans and extensions easy to find and offering more flexible ways to pay. We also have a great two-part white paper on this topic, "Affordability and Trust: The Utility Industry at a Crossroads," and we'll make sure the link is in the episode description, along with the webinar recording. Or you can always visit KUBRA.com at any time to find this content in our Resources Section.  

Thanks for listening to Experience Better: the CX Podcast by KUBRA. We'll see you next time.