Beyond Social Media: How PG&E  is engaging customers

When it comes to serving your audience potentially life-saving information, social media doesn’t cut it. The occasional view sites like Facebook and Twitter delivered amidst a sea of distractions made it difficult for PG&E customers to access preparedness resources regarding natural disasters and emergencies. As California’s leading energy provider PG&E knew they had to engage their audience on their own terms. To solve the problem head-on PG&E partnered with Countable to create the Safety Action Center.  On this new impact site, PG&E resources could be engaged with by any customer, without having to search through feeds of ads and distractions.

Serving content was only the beginning. By leveraging Countable’s engagement features PG&E opened a new avenue of customer data. Opportunities for users to share, react, sign, pledge, and complete complex actions like create an emergency plan became new data points for PG&E to learn what their customers wanted and needed. Detailed reports on the site’s back-end gave PG&E the power to further bolster their content and drive thousands of engagements on their site daily. Now with new internationalization features, PG&E can even learn from and better serve California’s non-English speaking population through the resources it provides.

With an engagement platform of their own, PG&E had a reason to invite users off social media and onto its own domain. In the Safety Action Center it controls how content is displayed, rather than depending on the whims of another company’s algorithm. And with rich data around their site’s usage, PG&E can better service an audience that stands to benefit from their work.