Why the UK’s largest energy supplier launched an Insight Community to drive confident customer-led decision making
The client is one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers, serving millions of customers. They are focused on sustainability, providing renewable electricity, smart home technology, and innovative tools to help households reduce carbon footprints.
Energy is a highly regulated, yet ‘low engagement’ category, where customers rarely interact beyond paying bills. This makes it harder to engage customers in insight, yet that insight is critical to delivering clearer communications, fairer propositions and better regulatory outcomes.
Driving engagement, acquisition and understanding of real world behaviours
The client wanted to launch a branded Insight Community, to enable rapid feedback from customers on comms and new propositions, in a cost-effective way. But there were three distinct challenges that needed to be resolved in the community solution:
- Driving engagement and relevance: Talking about energy isn’t inherently fun in the way that talking about topics such as food, fashion or TV is; customer expectations of energy Communities are different too – they’re more task focused and don’t want to be engaged for engagement’s sake. Without meaningful engagement, the Community couldn’t deliver on the clients insight aims.
- Avoiding an echo chamber: The client’s current customer base are enthusiastic about green energy – much more so than the average energy customer. Left unchecked, the Community risked reflecting only its most engaged customers.
- Bridging the ‘say-do’ gap: in research, most people say they prioritise sustainability and energy saving, but actual behaviour (such as turning the thermostat down at home) doesn’t always match up. How could real-world behaviours be distinguished from optimistic claims?
Delivering confident decision-making in a low engagement sector
The client launched an Insight Community which focused on:
- Relevant engagement from day one: Recognising that energy customers are task‑focused rather than engagement‑seeking, the community experience was designed to be purposeful from the first login. Early activities were simple, relevant and quick to complete, supported by fast feedback loops that showed members how their input was being used. This reinforced the value of participation early, building confidence, trust and sustained engagement.
- Customer closeness, without losing the market view: The community combines a core group of customers with nationally representative top‑ups via Researchbods’ in‑house panel. This creates a powerful dual lens: deep, ongoing customer understanding for internal stakeholders, alongside an easy way to sense‑check ideas against the wider energy market. The result is a community that delivers customer intimacy without becoming an echo chamber.
- Closing the say–do gap through behavioural insight: To move beyond stated attitudes, the community integrates behavioural and System 1 tools alongside customers’ actual energy usage data. Longitudinal analysis enables the client to distinguish short‑term reactions from genuine behavioural shifts, triangulating what customers say, what they do, and how attitudes translate into real‑world outcomes over time.
A high-engagement community driving confidence, speed and behavioural truth
The Insight Community has directly addressed the core challenges of engagement, representativeness and unpicking the ‘say-do’ gap.
- Driving engagement in a low-interest category: Despite operating in a highly regulated, low-engagement sector, the community consistently delivers sector-leading engagement rates – including on more sensitive or regulatory topics. Participation from vulnerable customers is 50% higher than equivalent ad-hoc approaches, demonstrating that purposeful engagement and fast feedback loops can provide engagement where it’s typically harder to achieve.
- Avoiding the echo chamber: By combining a core community with nationally representative top-ups, the client has delivered customer- and market-reflective samples across more than 60 projects in the first year, at speed, with an average turnaround time of a week. This has given stakeholders confidence that decisions are grounded not just in the views of their most vocal customers, but in the wider energy market’s too.
- Closing the say-do gap: Integrating behavioural approaches and real energy usage data has enabled the client to move beyond stated intent, validating where attitudes translate into real-world behaviour. This has led to clearer customer communications, sharper prioritisation of propositions and faster decision-making.
Together, the community has become a trusted decision‑making engine — reducing risk, accelerating insight and embedding customer voice at the heart of change
Launch an Insight Community to drive engagement, acquisition and understanding
Discover how an Insight Community can drive engagement, acquisition and understanding of real world behaviours – even in low-engagement categories.
