How utilities can build a digital app that works as well as the grid
This is the third post in our series on how specific industries can modernize the way they build digital products. The first looked at industrial manufacturing and the second at grocery retail. This one looks at electric and gas utilities, which with the endless demand for power due to AI data centers, are running the largest capital program in their history while their customers are rating their apps and websites below almost every other industry's.
Our co-founder Jeff Gothelf spent part of this week trying to change the name on the electric account for his family's apartment in Miami. It didn’t seem like a major change. He wanted to change the name from his own first name to his wife's. Same last name, same address, same payment method, same everything, except the first name. The utility's app had no way to do it. The website had a chat bot which our fearless hero immediately avoided having been burned by useless AI chatbot support tools. He did however surf the site looking for the name change option and, lo and behold, it was easy to find (hooray!). However, when he submitted the requested name change it returned an error and offered two ways forward. He could either call customer service or cancel the service and start it again under the new name. He called, waited on hold for what seemed like an eternity and eventually reached a representative who had clearly taken about 1000 calls by that point that day and had no patience for one more change request. The seemingly easy change did not deliver on the promise of our glorious digital present and future.
The utility in this story is, by every measure that matters to a regulator, a competent company. It keeps the lights on, it restores power after storms, and it is almost certainly spending more on its grid this year than it ever has. The gap between it’s focus on keeping the lights on and keeping customers happy is what this post is all about.
How utilities companies operate
Utilities are built around capital projects. They are very good at them. A substation, a transmission line, a storm-hardening program or a new plant starts as a defined scope with a budget that a public utility commission has approved. On top of that there is a schedule and a result that will be measured in outage minutes once it is in service. The whole organization, from engineering to regulatory affairs to finance, is designed to get that kind of project from approval to launch and to prove afterwards that it delivered what was promised. (if you read our post on project management, this is exactly where that discipline shines)
These grids are working harder than they ever have. According to the Edison Electric Institute, investor-owned electric companies spent a record $204 billion on capital projects in 2025, the fourteenth straight record year. They expect to spend about $239 billion in 2026 and $1.4 trillion through 2030, driven by electrification, onshored manufacturing and data centers. It is the largest build-out of the grid in history, and it works because the end state is physical, the requirements come from outside the company, and the measure of success is fixed before ground is broken.
What utility companies need to bring their digital experience into the 21st century
The same physical delivery excellence machine gets directed to build the utility’s digital experiences as well. A customer portal or mobile app is set up as a capital project with a vendor, a scope (pay the bill, view usage, report an outage, start or stop service), a launch date and a budget line. The project ends when the app launches, the team disbands, and the app moves into "maintenance." There it sits next to a thousand other systems nobody is actively improving. Anything that was out of scope on launch day, like changing a first name on an account, stays out of scope for years, and the error page that offers a phone call or a cancellation is the only resolution a customer can expect for the foreseeable future.
This does not go unnoticed by customers. In J.D. Power's 2026 U.S. Utility Digital Experience Study, which surveyed 13,514 customers of the 46 largest electric, gas and water utilities, overall digital satisfaction came in at 616 on a 1,000-point scale, against 734 for wealth management apps and websites and 699 for property and casualty insurers. 28% of those utilities still have no mobile app at all. The gap between the best and worst utility was 100 points, and the biggest gaps were in viewing current outages, reporting an outage or a leak, and changing pricing plans. Arguably, these are the three moments when a customer most needs the utility’s digital experience to work. Cory Maxwell, who runs digital solutions at J.D. Power, put it plainly, "We're still seeing a clear split among utilities when it comes to their digital offerings." (For us the tl;dr here is that people would rather contact their insurance company online than their utility. That says something.)
The reason the split between the digital experience and the service delivery experience exists is that a substation has an operator/owner who is accountable for its outage minutes for as long as it is in service. The utility’s mobile app usually has no equivalent person. Nobody owns the number of phone calls the app should have prevented so nobody notices when a name change generates one (or a thousand). The customer who just spent 40 minutes on hold judges the whole company by it regardless of how reliable the grid behind it is.
What a utility company can do to improve its digital products and services
Write the customer task before the feature. Before anything goes on the roadmap or the RFP ask the team to describe what a customer will be able to do once it exists. Do it in one sentence with a number attached to it that quantifies the desired behavior. "A customer changes the name on an account in under five minutes without calling" is a very good place to start. "Account management module" is a description of the software with no mention of the customer nor why they would want to use it. If your teams start from this type of statement, that’s fine. They then need to ask what the customer will be able to do with this new feature and rewrite that sentence from the customer’s point of view. Utilities already think this way about reliability, where the goal is a number of outage minutes rather than a list of equipment,. The same discipline works on the app and other digital products.
Treat the call center as the discovery backlog. Utilities have something most product teams would pay for. They have a complete, categorized record of every reason a customer called. The ten most common call reasons that an app could absorb should become the roadmap for your website and mobile app. Because you can quantify from the call center how big of a problem each customer behavior is, you can target a specific, measurable improvement in that same behavior once the mobile app or website are launched or updated. Pick one of these baselines. Find out what customers actually did before and after the call (Jeff's call was logged under some category, while the app and website failure never were). Your goal should be to get to zero calls for your chosen customer behavior.
Measure the app the way you measure the grid. A utility can tell a regulator its reliability numbers to the decimal. Apply the same rigor to your digital products and services. For each customer task, measure the share of customers who complete it without a call, the time it takes, and the calls that no longer happen. Review those numbers monthly the way reliability is reviewed, and treat a feature that does not move its number against your expectations the way you would treat physical equipment that keeps failing. Fix it or take it out of service.
None of this requires a utility to become a software company. It requires applying the ownership discipline it already has for physical assets to the one asset every customer touches.
How to get started
Pick one team. Choose one of the bigger reasons people call the call center. Give that one team this theme and a quarter to work on it. Name changes, moves and payment arrangements are good candidates because they are frequent, bounded, and currently generate calls that the app or website could absorb. Write down the number of calls that reason generates today, the behavior you expect to change, and the target. Give the team the room and freedom to work to solve that one customer journey. Review what happened at the end of the quarter. If you can get just 1 new feature to ship that measurably moves calls out of the contact center, it will do more for the digital program's credibility, inside the company and in front of your customers, than a redesigned home screen ever would.
At Sense & Respond Learning, we help product, design and engineering teams make this shift from output to outcomes, with practical training in product discovery, Lean product management and OKRs. If your organization is spending more on the grid than ever and still sending customers to the phone, we'd love to talk.