Nighthawk announced last week that they are launching a Consumer Engagement Platform that will utilize the award winning “Cloud” based service.  It is a full engagement and communications platform that delivers messaging and real time usage data in a variety of easy to understand graphs as well as opportunities and tips for customers to reduce their monthly costs and usage. The multi-tenant platform enables electric, water and gas utilities for a complete approach to resource optimization. All customers would like to save money on their utilities. The Consumer Engagement Portal equips them to meet this goal.

This engagement directly meets the demands of customers to better understand utility usage, become better stewards of the environment and most importantly lower utility costs. Customers become directly engaged with the utility and are more receptive to communications delivered through the platform.

Nighthawk’s Consumer Engagement Portal is a game changing platform with analytical features and customized comparisons of similarly sized homes without requiring the homeowner to complete long surveys or enter extensive information. The portal allows utilities to provide customers with the granular data they are requesting about daily usage and how they compare to similar neighbors. Powered by Nighthawk’s “cloud” based WebConnect™ platform the new portal offering is both more robust and more affordable than others available.

The portal also offers easy to understand graphs including the display of weather and how it relates to utility usage.  Previous periods can be selected and compared to the currently selected period.  Alerts for cost and usage thresholds can be configured to text or email notifications when they are exceeded.  Comparison data displays usage by similar homes in the zip code broken out to highlight savings enjoyed by the most efficient neighbors. Utilities gain the opportunity to send temperature and weather related messaging in addition to suggestions for conservation.

Nighthawk’s Consumer Engagement Portal takes advantage of the fact that when people are given the ability to understand usage patterns and shown the savings enjoyed by neighbors they are much more likely to adopt those savings habits themselves.

These savings and the increased communication between utility and customer equate to a virtual demand response program requiring no additional equipment or maintenance. It is the most cost effective form of demand response. Nighthawk’s Consumer Engagement Portal can be configured to work with your existing billing and meter systems. Nighthawk utilizes cellular communication combined with ERT reading technology to collect data from new or legacy systems.  Their flexible database and open API solution allows for quick implementation and is offered as a fully hosted turnkey solution for utilities of any size.

We’re excited about this new platform and know that our customers will be as well.