A blog about the Business of Energy

Your level of customer service is based on your ability to communicate well.

Whether you are selling or providing a service, your communication skills dictate your success.  As an auditor, my ability to communicate effectively is the most important part of my job.

I start by parking where they can clearly see my car with our company logo on it. I approach each customer with a clear and open state of mind.  Before I get out of my car I take a deep breath and smile. This can put me in a better mood even on the worst of days.  I use eye contact when greeted at the door. Would you trust someone in your house if they couldn’t look you in the eye?   I also make sure to get their name while shaking their hands.

To be an effective communicator, you must first be a great listener.  Ask questions, read the situation. Listen. Out in the field I meet folks that are very receptive and want to learn as much from me as possible. Others want nothing to with the entire process, and I’m just the avenue to getting them specific rebates (mainly people that want windows).   Act accordingly with patience.

There are different ways to treat different kinds of people.  You will find customers who want to learn from you, which is why we are there in the first place. It can be difficult to complete your audit in time as they want to walk with you and talk the whole time.  At the beginning of every audit, I like to give the client a rundown of what will happen.  E.g. “First, I will complete your audit, and then invite you to join me throughout the home for examples of how you can improve your energy efficiency.”

Some customers may be having a bad day or are just angry people. Some feel the need to argue anything, as they seem to already know everything and aren’t open to suggestions.  It’s an art to get them to accept new ideas. I often hear myself say things like, “You could also think of it this way,” or “You probably already know this, but…”

Auditors tend to deal with elderly quite often.  I always treat them with great respect; they respond well to sir/ma’am, and really appreciate it. I’ve met some of the most wonderful elderly people, and I’ve been rewarded with a few homemade treats!

Every day I am a teacher of energy efficiency, and every day I am a student of customer service and communication.  Remember you are only at a home for a short time. Always be kind and courteous, and be the best communicator you can.

Parker Lahti
Energy Rater and Auditor
EnergyLogic, Inc.

One of the best (and perhaps obvious?) uses of the HERS index is to enable homebuilders to draw a very clear distinction between the homes they build and existing homes that are on the market.  Much of the focus for builders right now is to distinguish their homes from the glut of existing homes on the market, many of which are priced significantly lower than new homes.  While most buyers certainly know that a new home will be more efficient than an existing home, few have any idea of just how much better any given home is.

Enter the HERS Index, which provides a buyer with a concrete means of seeing just how much more efficient new homes are than existing homes.   For example, a typical home that EnergyLogic performs an energy rating on in Colorado has a HERS Score around 70.  A typical existing home will have a score well above 100, most commonly around 130.  It’s a relative index, with low scores being better scores.  So, a home that is a 70 is nearly twice as efficient as a home at 130.  The HERS Index is the foundation for most efficiency and green programs.  The excellent blog “Nice House, But Is It Legal?”, from the Rocky Mountain Institute has a fantastic graphic showing where various programs and codes fall on the Index.

The HERS Index is a powerful tool for builders to demonstrate the superiority of their product versus the existing home competition.  Builders across the nation are adopting the HERS Index as part of their marketing programs both to compete with existing homes but also to compete with other new homes.  In many areas, builders, working with energy rating firms, are developing marketing plans that have the HERS Index at the core of their message to potential buyers.  The simplicity and multiple value add aspects of performing a HERS Rating; quality assurance, code compliance, process improvement (just to name a few) are making energy ratings ever more sensible for builders today.

Steve Byers
CEO of EnergyLogic

While this thread came from a discussion of pricing for Energy Star Version 3, it applies to any service you might offer. Pricing is one of the most difficult tasks you face as a business.  I’ve written a related post on Firing a Client and we’ve also discussed how we set pricing for software services.  Let’s start by assuming that a “good” price is one in which we have an equal exchange of money for value.  What other questions should you try to answer?

• What will the market bear?
• Can you deliver the service for less without sacrificing quality?
• Are you building a business or working for wages?
• Could you scale up at the price you’ve set?

All of these questions (and there are a LOT more!) are considerations for pricing your services.  I’d like to spend a few words discussing the last bullet, price versus scale.  In an immature, developing service industry, there are typically a multitude of small companies, many of them sole proprietors.  These companies are able to offer their services for a very low price as they have insignificant overhead; tend to have simple systems and far too often don’t understand the implications of pricing.  A key factor in small business failure is attempting to fight a price war.  I just wrote about this in my last post about racing to the bottom.

As an industry scales up, the assumption is that prices will drop. This is often true in product sectors. I’d like to propose a contrasting position; as an industry scales up, in order to meet market demand, prices must increase to handle increased complexity and overhead requirements.  BIG CAVEAT: This presumes consistent quality of service.  That is, it presumes and apples to apples comparison.  If quality is eroded, then my theory doesn’t hold.  I contend that the impact on the industry (any industry, but especially service industries) if quality is diminished will be negative.  In my opinion, we are a trust agent industry.  If and when we lose that, we all lose for a long time.  Finally, as an industry achieves maturity, prices can come down again as economies of scale and other synergies come into play. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as the integrity of the industry is protected.

I think it’s critical for the long term health of our industry that we all work to support and demand a high level of accountability, enforcement of standards and ethical behavior.  For better or worse at the moment, we must self-police.   This is not a call for collusion.  It is a call for demanding quality of ourselves and our peers.  In fact, we can and should explore increasing oversight and raising standards.  The Rating Registry is an example of something that will benefit us all.  Yes, it’s additional effort, but the payback for the industry as a whole is worth it.  (We’ve got a very nice system for handling your registry woes built into our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System iRate® if you’re interested.  See this blog post on our solution!)

We work in a price sensitive environment to be sure. Builders, homeowners and utilities are cost-conscious shoppers.  However, we do ourselves and our businesses no favors by racing to the bottom.  In the words of Mark Twain (possibly?), “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”  We’ve seen this before; markets nearly drive themselves to destruction with price wars.  Quality suffers, companies go out of business, and industry integrity is damaged.  It is my fervent hope that we are building an industry that will supply meaningful work that is fairly compensated–that our industry will be stable enough to grow, mature and deliver ever better service and information to our customers. 

Many of us have worked long and hard to bring this industry to where it is today.  And where is that?   I think we’ve built a foundation of credibility for long-term, sustainable growth.  It’s up to us not to screw it up.

First – Get yourself some new windows.  This will save you about 50% on your energy bills.

Okay!  50% to go right!  (nudge, nudge, wink, wink – don’t get all “mathy” on me for those of you who are thinking “but, but, you can only save a percentage of what’s left, not the remainder!” – tell it to the marketing department)

Second – Get yourself one of those Amish space heaters.  Good for another 50%!  Sweet!  Technically we’re done.  But let’s go ahead and be sure we’re all the way there.

Third – Paint your house up with some of that fancy NASA ceramic paint.  Now these boys have toned down their claims so we can feel real good about getting another 20% of our energy saved.  Whoo Hoo!  Dang, we might be turnin’ the meter backwards!

Cue – Cold Shower, Slap the Face, Ridiculously Loud Alarm Clock.There is a Sucker Born Every Minute.  PT Barnum didn’t actually say that, but oh my is it true.  Or, in the words of Dean Vernon Wormer, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
It’s really time for folks to wake up about the simple math; whether it be deficit spending, basic understanding of energy or too good to be true scams.  Stay tuned for some simple back of the napkin ways to show homeowners why the items above are too good to be true.  Can we coin a new acronym for this?  We have TBTF for behemoth Wall St. banks, how about TGTBT for energy scams!

In getting this tongue-in-cheek exercise together I found this site http://www.nlcpr.com/index.php  referenced above as well.   Nice work!

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”

-Mark Twain (popularized)

We’ve all heard this quote.  It speaks to the ability of clever folks to manipulate data to tell a story that supports a particular point of view regardless of what the data actually tells us.  One reason that infographics have become so popular is that few Americans (and others I presume) are capable of understanding basic statistics.  There is an increasing flood of data and an ever increasing need for people to either deliver or understand data.  However, if you can’t understand statistics, it doesn’t do much good to either deliver the data or to receive it.

Infographics help to bridge this lack of statistical literacy.  We like pictures, we understand pictures and indeed, pictures can deliver an amazing amount of information in a short amount of time.  I also believe that pictures and thus infographics have become increasingly important as we’ve become an increasingly visually focused nation.

However, whether intentional or not, as you move from raw data to statistical summary to infographic, there is potential for manipulation or error at every step (think of it as analagous to loss of energy for every step of a physical process).  It’s incumbent on the designer of an infographic to understand the data that is being represented.  The more complex the data, the more difficult an accurate representation will be.   This link will take you to a great article that goes into much more depth on poor infographic representation.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/10/imagine-a-pie-chart-stomping-on-an-infographic-forever/

and here, also wonderful:

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/

I really like infographics and I think they have a great deal to tell us about how we use energy and where best to focus our efforts.   It’s just really important that we pay attention to the presentation of the data and that we take a step back from pretty pictures and both conduct a sniff test and ask simple questions about what we’re seeing.

Here is my very lame effort to show a very simple example of how easy it is to skew the perspective of a homeowner.  Same data, what’s different?  What conclusions might you draw if you don’t notice what’s different about how these two identical sets of data are depicted?

You rub it with your sleeve…

Thank you, thank you for freeing me from the lamp!  I grant you one, no not three, deflation you know, energy auditor SUPER POWER!  So, what will it be?  I can grant you any SUPER POWER to perform the most awesome energy audits in the history of mankind.   I will grant you this power but you must use if wisely.  Perhaps you will squander it, perhaps you will keep it a secret, only for yourself, consider wisely…

Not sure?  Perhaps you’d like INFRARED VISION?  No more infrared cameras for you!  You’ll SEE into the walls, the roof, the ceiling, you will be as Ozmandius!

Perhaps you’d like the capacity to FLY FROM HOME TO HOME?  No more driving between homes, that will be for mere mortals.  You will fly over traffic, defy road construction, laugh in the teeth of rush hours.

Or maybe you’d like to possess the MIGHTY WIND.  You laugh, thinking that you already have the mighty wind.  I could grant you the ability to depressurize a home without tools, with exact calibration known immediately to your mind.  And your mind alone.  You will be as the house whisperer!

No?  Then perhaps you’d like to have SUPER REPORT WRITING PROWESS!  You’ll write reports at a blistering pace, with the analysis skills of Jack Bauer, the wit of T.S. Eliot, the grace of Annie Dillard.  Your clients will be awed with the reports you deliver!

Or perhaps… perhaps, you’d like the ability to PERSUADE.  It sounds like nothing doesn’t it.  To simply be able to persuade your clients to act, to persuade them, to influence them to make the right decisions.  To have the power to move from Audit to Action!

Choose now.  Choose well.

You’re probably thinking, well not much, and you would be wrong. Yes, as you can see from the picture, Andy McCluskey is pointing at you. And though he’s singing, he’s probably thinking “Why is it that so little progress has been made in energy conservation since we started this band in 1978? How can it possibly be that US per capita energy consumption is basically flat since then?” Well, perhaps not, but it’s possible.

This is a band that sang these lyrics:
Our one source of energy
The ultimate discovery
Electric blue for me
Never more to be free
Electricity
Nuclear and HEP
Carbon fuels from the sea
Wasted electricity

Our one source of energy
Electricity
All we need to live today
A gift for man to throw away
The chance to change has nearly gone
The alternative is only one
The final source of energy
Solar electricity

The song was Electricity written in 1976. Yes, 1976. I was all of 11 years old and they were 17. And here we are 35 years later. Yet, this 51 year old lead singer of an iconic synth-pop band still moves as if he was 17 years old. So, nothing is impossible…

Actually if we could just harness the energy of the dance floor, our troubles might be over! It was really fun to see a band that I never thought I would see live. It was equally fun to watch my contemporaries, aka, 45-55 year old people, lose themselves in music, jump up and down, sing at the top of their lungs and not look the least bit self-conscious about it. Women (and men) in the crowd were acting like Justin Bieber groupies trying to high-five our ’80′s band heroes. Glorious I tell you!

I guess we can say what we often say to distraught homeowners, “There are no problems, only opportunities”, but that doesn’t ring very true at the macro level. Is it true that, “The chance to change has nearly gone”, or not. I’d like to think that we still have time to change before change is forced on us, but the longer that we go on without dealing with obvious resource limits, the worse it will be. It doesn’t matter if the motivation is climate change, getting comfortable, saving money or sticking it to the man, any reason for getting our act together works for me.

So, a couple of 17 year old Brits in 1976 sang about the need to stop wasting electricity and start producing it with solar sources. Perhaps it’s time we caught up to that idea…

Perhaps in future entries I can explore more of this OMD and Energy relationship. After all they also wrote, Tesla Girls, Locomotion and Enola Gay.

Thank you Paul, Andy and the whole OMD team for the great show and the thoughts it generated.

Minority Report
Thoughts on Energy Audit Reports
I’ve been thinking a great deal about energy audit reports lately. These thoughts aren’t unrelated to the fact that I’m charged with designing new audit reports for OptiMiser, a new energy modeling program. I think that we all know the current state of audit reports, at least most of them. They typically go something like this:
1. The Auditor as a Young Man (the James Joyce model) – a stream of consciousness approach to reporting the findings of an audit. Tending toward epic length, rarely less than 40 or 50 pages. Read completely as often as Joyce outside of English Lit classes. These reports take roughly as long to prepare as Joyce took to write his novels.
2. The Twilight Series model – as long as the James Joyce novel but far more tedious. However, as opposed to the Joyce model, the Twilight model is actually 97% boilerplate and thus is an overwhelmingly formulaic approach to producing an audit approach. Like Joyce and unlike the Twilight books, these reports similarly go unread.
3. The Auditor as channeled by the Graphic Designer model – getting overly cute with graphic design to the detriment of delivering the information to the client. I’ve seen some really beautiful work out there that if delivered exclusively to hip, urban audiences would be a true blow to the solar plexus of energy apathy. However, if delivered to my parents would be as effective as texting to a teen with actual real live words. More on this later. By the way, orange print on white and vice versa is difficult to read for anyone over the age of 27.
4. The Dr. Science approach (with credit to Dr. Science from Ducksbreath Theater “I’m a scientist and I know more than you”) – this model is far less about giving the client (aka homeowner) the information they need than about showing the client how staggeringly smart you are as the auditor. Makes liberal use of words like “permeance”, “thermography”, and coupling anything with “barrier”. Really. Step back from this mode unless you happen to be delivering an audit to another auditor. Seth Godin has a great comment on data vs intuition.
5. The if less is more then even less is even more model – wherein you drain the report of detail to the point that it really ought be delivered on a post-it note. Now this approach actually is much closer to what I think the “right” approach is (more on what’s “right” soon). An audit report is part of the big picture of what I call “Audit to Action”. Strip of the “why” and you’ve lost some of the potential of the report.
I could probably go on here, but I hope the point is made.

Now, full disclosure time: I’ve delivered every single one of the types of audit reports I’ve listed above. I think our industry is in a period of frantic and rapid evolution. Figuring out the “best” way to prepare and deliver an audit report is part of that evolution.
Now, how about some generic mistakes that I think we’ve made and are still making.
1. One size fits all – we don’t all buy the same tv, phone, car or any other product. Similarly, for services, we make distinctions on based on customer service, reputation, price and even how snappy the graphics are on a companies vehicles (quick, what do Geek Squad vehicles look like?) Why are we content to deliver the exact same report to everyone regardless of their needs, interests and motivations? We need to fix this.
2. Timeliness – producing epic reports by hand leads to epic turn around times on audit reports. Any of us who have been guilty of this approach have probably had the following exchange:

“Hi Steve, gosh, you were out at our house, what three weeks ago and we’re wondering where our report is?”
“Yes Mrs. Smith, I’m just putting the finishing touches on your report. I’ll get it out to you tomorrow.”
Which translates to one of the following:
• You haven’t actually even started the Smith report because you’re really busy and you keep meaning to get to it, but doggone it you just haven’t.
• You really are putting the finishing touches on the Smith report, but it takes a long time to write an epic, even one that no one will actually read. By the way, did you forget to do last month’s billing?
• You finished the Smith report, but you forgot to send it. Oi!
3. Not understanding the point of the audit – Really! What is an audit for? “Audit to Action”, say it with me! “Audit to Action”. If there isn’t a living, breathing call to action front and center on your report there ought to be. Corollary mistake, bury the call to action on page 45. Oops. They never got there. People are busy. How often do you sit down to read a technical opus outside of your chosen profession? Do you read all the fine print in the contracts that you sign? Ever scrolled to bottom of the terms of use for an online tool? I thought so. People are generally asking one, sort of simple question, “What should I do?” You are the professional, for the most part, the “why” they should do it is white noise. Not for everyone, but for the vast majority.

I don’t have all the answers to be sure. We’re working on audit report tools that address each of these issues. We’d love to hear what you think.

I’ve posted a new OptiMiser update for those following OptiMiser news…
OptiMiser Update 10-30-2009 – Lots of Tricks (and Treats)!

D'Oh!
Don't forget to close that fireplace flue and vacuum out the ashes or cover them with wet newspaper.

Don’t forget to close that fireplace flue and vacuum out the ashes or cover them with wet newspaper.

Here at EnergyLogic, we keep a folder on the server for Hall of Fame and Hall of Shame pictures.  The latter is a collection of energy and safety faux pas and gaffes that we refer to loosely as ‘Raterporn.”  As a QA Designee I get a lot of interesting pictures sent to me from raters around the country and I thought it would be nice to begin sharing some of the best (and worst).  This picture was taken by one of EnergyLogic’s own.  I am posting it because I think it illustrates very well the different mindset required for testing an existing home versus a new home.  This rater (who shall remain anonymous) works almost exclusively on new homes.  In this case, the local building department granted a temporary Certificate of Occupancy before all construction was complete due to a hardship (this family’s original home was destroyed in a tornado).  All fine and well, except that our rater took his ‘new home mindset’ into this occupied house and neglected to close the fireplace flue damper and clean out the ash.  The result when he ran the depressurization test was a fine cloud of ash that was distributed nicely throughout the main living area including the cream colored rug in front of the fireplace.

Here is the lesson: if you don’t want to make that repentant call to your home owner or pay a carpet cleaning bill, don’t forget to address the fireplaces and wood burning stoves prior to running the blower door!  And remember, occupied homes are just a whole different animal!