“Safe, reliable power” sits at the center of every utility’s promise to its customers. And it should. Customers expect their utility to keep the power on and restore it safely when something goes wrong.
Reliability will always be an important goal for utility operations. But for marketing and customer communications, companies need to deliver more.
We wanted to understand what that “more” could look like. A text before a storm. A clear answer for why a bill jumped. A heads-up about a helpful program before you have to go looking for it.
We explored these questions through two AI-enabled synthetic focus groups: one with 10 residential energy decision-makers and another with 10 small business energy decision-makers.
The findings are directional, not statistically representative. But they changed how we think about the opportunity.
We started by asking whether reliability could become a broader brand position for utilities. What we found was that customers already view reliability as table stakes. It remains essential to the business, but it may not be enough to differentiate a utility or strengthen its customer relationships.
For marketers and communicators, the bigger opportunity is proactivity: reaching out first, providing useful context and helping customers understand what is happening before they have to ask.
Being Stable Is Not the Same as Being Predictable
Customers didn’t question whether their utility would stick around. Utilities have been around for a long time, and people see them as stable institutions.
What they questioned was whether they knew what to expect from them.
Residential customers talked about predictability in the context of their daily lives, especially when bills, rates, weather or outages disrupted their routines. Small business customers were more practical about it. Could they plan a budget, manage staffing or make operational decisions based on what their utility told them?
One synthetic residential participant put it this way:
“Stable, yes. Predictable, less so. ‘Predictable’ and ‘stable’ aren’t the same thing to me.”
A synthetic small business participant made a similar point:
“A stable company can still be an unpredictable one to actually do business with.”
That distinction matters. Predictability doesn’t mean promising that bills will never change or outages will never happen. It means helping customers understand what is happening, why it is happening and what comes next.
Customers Want Context, Not Certainty
This came through clearly around outage communications.
Several residential participants said they would rather receive a realistic restoration window with helpful context than an exact time without any explanation. They didn’t expect their utility to know the exact minute the power would come back. They wanted an honest estimate and a simple reason for the delay.
One synthetic participant explained it this way:
“A range with a reason attached, like ‘four to six hours because it’s a downed line, not equipment failure,’ reads as honest to me.”
That insight stuck with me. If my power is out, I want to know when it might come back, but I also want to know why it happened. It doesn’t need to be technical. A downed tree, damaged equipment or a safety issue can make the situation feel less like a black box.
The same held true when participants talked about why one area might be restored faster than another. Without an explanation, the difference could feel suspicious or unfair. A reason, even one tied to safety or infrastructure conditions, made the decision easier to understand.
Customers don’t expect certainty when a situation is still unfolding. They do expect transparency.
Reaching Out First Resonated Most
We tested three ways to describe a broader utility relationship. One was the clear favorite across both groups:
“Reliability means your utility reaches out to you before a storm, before a bill spikes, before you have to ask for help, instead of waiting for you to come to them.”
This worked because it described something customers could actually picture their utility doing. It turned reliability from a value into a behavior.
That is the larger communications opportunity. Reliability is the operational promise every utility must deliver. Proactivity is how marketers and communicators can make that promise more visible and meaningful to customers.
This idea also came through when small business participants talked about rebates, credits and assistance programs. Several said they had learned about relevant programs through another business owner or a contractor, not from their utility.
The frustration wasn’t that the programs didn’t exist. It was that finding them felt like luck.
One synthetic restaurant owner put it this way:
“Feels like information that should reach anyone in my exact situation, not just whoever happens to ask the right person.”
Utilities have already built these programs. The opportunity is to make sure the right customers hear about them at the right time.
That doesn’t mean communicating more just for the sake of it. Participants, especially small business owners, cared more about relevance than frequency. They were comfortable with more updates during a high-risk period, such as hurricane season, but didn’t want the same level of communication when nothing was happening.
Be proactive. Just make it useful.
Turning Reliability Into Something Customers Can Feel
A few practical opportunities came out of the research:
- Pair outage restoration windows with a plain-language explanation.
- Send proactive alerts about outage risks, unusual bill increases and relevant programs.
- Explain restoration and prioritization decisions instead of leaving customers to guess.
- Make rebates, assistance and efficiency programs easier for eligible customers to find.
- Check whether renters and small businesses are receiving the same level of communication as homeowners and larger accounts.
None of this replaces the core job of delivering safe, reliable power. Reliability should remain a central goal for utility operations. But for marketing and customer communications, simply promising reliability is no longer enough.
Customers aren’t asking their utility to be nicer. They’re asking it to be more honest, more proactive and easier to count on.
Reliability keeps the system running. Proactive communication helps customers see, understand and trust the work happening behind it.
Our companion article, “Synthetic Research Isn’t a Shortcut. It’s a Head Start,” goes deeper into how we used AI-enabled synthetic research to explore these questions. We’ll also be sharing more at E Source. If you’ll be there, come find us. If not, reach out to the Mower team and let’s keep talking.