LIHEAP Outreach Bot

I work for a public utility that services Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas. As of 2016, 37% of our customers experienced an energy burden above the national threshold.

The federal government has a program, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or “LIHEAP” that assists low-income households, particularly those with disproportionately high energy costs, to cover their home energy costs by making payments directly to the customers’ utility provider.

Customers can receive LIHEAP assistance by contacting agencies across the state and applying for a LIHEAP grant. Historically, the agencies have not had the adequate marketing resources to notify the communities they serve that assistance may be available to them. We have tried manual outreach campaigns in the past, but they are costly and time-consuming with a limited subset of customers able to be contacted.

With the onset of COVID-19, some of the hardest hit financially have been our low-income customers. The pandemic created a more pressing need to get LIHEAP information to low-income customers who may need more assistance than ever in paying their electric bill.

Additionally, with the passing of the CARES Act, an additional $900 million was given to LIHEAP so there are now more funds than ever for our customers to receive.

We created a bot to assist with the customer outreach informing them of the LIHEAP program and instructing how to apply for a LIHEAP grant.

First the LIHEAP bot pulls all customer data on a weekly basis. This consists of demographic information along with any past due bill amount. The bot then compares the customer information with credit information to find those whose annual household income is $35,000 or less. Using both sets of data, the bot will create a subset containing only those whose annual household income is $35,000 or less and who have a past due bill of greater than $125. Using this subset of customer data, the bot then does a geographic comparison by zip code to find the closest LIHEAP agency by customer. The LIHEAP bot then contacts the customers via email and auto-dialer letting them know they may be eligible to receive a LIHEAP grant, provides them with the contact information (address, phone number, email, and website) for the closes LIHEAP agency, and in the email outreach includes an infographic of a guide to applying for a LIHEAP grant.

The bot runs every week in production and currently contacts about 75,000 customers each week. From the first week’s running, we found that of the customers who went through the process and received a LIHEAP grant, the average grant was almost $500. At scale, we estimate that we should see over $1 million in LIHEAP grants given to our eligible customers.

This bot positively impacts all stakeholders of our company; it helps our low-income customers by assisting them in receiving grants to pay their electric bill, it supports our communities by informing them of options available to them, the grants also reduce our potential electric disconnects and lowers bad debt write-off to the company, supporting our shareholders’ interests, and assists our employees by performing an outreach that would have previously been done manually for a minute subset of who the bot is able to contact.

Built With

• automation