ComEd Wins Communications Award Using Apogee Interactive’s Reliability Report Videos

Chartwell Recognizes ComEd as Utility Industry Leader with 2022 Best Practices Gold Communications Award


ATLANTA, Oct. 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Apogee Interactive, the creator of the Envoy communications platform and personalized video bill explanations for utilities, proudly congratulates Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) as the recipient of Chartwell’s 2022 Best Practices Gold Communications Award. ComEd will receive the prestigious award for its Personalized Reliability Reports (PRR) video developed by Apogee to educate customers about their outages. The 2022 Chartwell Best Practices Awards recognize excellence among electric and gas utilities with respect to projects, programs and service initiatives aimed at improving the customer experience, communications, and awareness.

ComEd’s Wendy Hines, Senior Business Project Manager, and project champion will present the case study at the 25th annual EMACS – The Customer Experience Conference in Orlando on October 19th. The conference, hosted by Chartwell, will draw more than 300 attendees from 65 utilities across the US.

ComEd, an electric service provider to more than 4 million customers in northern Illinois, recently spent $2.6 billion to upgrade its electric grid. However, even though reliability had improved more than 60% since 2012, surveys continued to indicate that most customers were unaware of the impact the upgrades had on the reliability of their electric service. As a result, ComEd partnered with Apogee Interactive to create Personalized Reliability Report (PRR) videos to help improve customers’ perception and overall customer satisfaction.

March through mid-April of 2022, ComEd emailed 2,113,393 PRR videos to residential customers. The video shows the customer their actual reliability for 2021 versus 2020, mentions their March bill will include a detailed personal reliability report, invites them to download the ComEd app, and then asks them to take a survey about the video.

ComEd’s personalized video reliability reports achieved a 45.14% unique open rate and 3.63% unique clickthroughs, a significant improvement over ComEd’s internal benchmarks. Most importantly, the survey responses reveal increased understanding and a more favorable impression of ComEd:

  • Over 91% liked the video - a lot (52%) or a little (38.73%)
  • Over 83% found the videos valuable - very (36.33%) or moderately (47.68%)
  • Nearly 98% thought the videos were easy to understand - very easy (70.79%) or easy (27.58%)
  • Nearly 52% felt more favorable toward ComEd after watching the video

Susan Gilbert, Apogee Co-Founder and CEO emphasized, “We are excited to see ComEd receive this well-deserved recognition as a leader in the energy industry and proud that Apogee had the opportunity to work with a forward-thinking utility. It is exciting to see ComEd receive this well-deserved recognition as a leader in the energy industry. Personal and relevant information provided promptly improves customer engagement and increases satisfaction.”

In addition to taking top honors in the communications category, ComEd also placed at the bronze level in the areas of customer service and digital experience.

Apogee Interactive, Inc. is a leading provider of customer engagement services for utilities, serving the energy industry since 1993. Apogee’s customer engagement platform helps utilities establish ongoing digital relationships with customers, helping them engage and educate customers, reduce costs, achieve behavioral energy efficiency, and grow customer satisfaction. Apogee’s solution enables personalized, relevant, video-based messaging through multiple channels, drives self-service, and improves operational efficiencies through marketing automation. Apogee’s loyal client base includes Southern Company, Liberty Utilities, Duquesne Light, Tampa Electric, People’s Gas, CenterPoint, Xcel Energy, Exelon, NextEra, LADWP, and hundreds of other IOU, municipal, cooperative, and gas utilities. For more information, visit www.apogee.net.

Contact: Karen Morris, 678-684-6801 info@apogee.net