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Stay updated with the latest trends, insights, and success stories from the BlastPoint team and our clients.
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May 21, 2020
Utility Customer Engagement Strategies For The COVID Era: Webinar Recap
BlastPoint CTO Tomer Borenstein shares insights and strategies for engaging low-income utility customers during the pandemic, in this webinar recap hosted by our friends at the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative. Proactively reaching out to your most vulnerable customers during a pandemic is not only possible; it’s absolutely necessary in order to help them–and your company–stay […]

May 14, 2020
What Keeps Customers From Enrolling In Your Awesome Programs? These 4 Barriers (Part 2)
Why aren’t more people signing up for your company’s extremely useful assistance programs? From psychological barriers to website blunders, we offer four major reasons your customers still haven’t enrolled. Learn from this two-part series on why enrollment could be suffering, and get ideas on how to boost your awesome program’s numbers. Last week we talked […]

May 7, 2020
What Keeps Customers From Enrolling In Your Awesome Programs? These 4 Barriers. (Part 1)
From psychological barriers to website blunders, we offer four major reasons your customers still haven’t enrolled in what should be extremely helpful assistance programs. Learn from this two-part series on why enrollment could be suffering, and get ideas on how to boost your awesome program’s numbers. You’ve identified a billpay problem, spoken to customers in […]

April 30, 2020
Why Text Message Alerts Are More Important Than Ever (And Not Just for Millennials)
More of your customers own smart phones than ever before, including those earning a limited income. Optimize automated text messaging in order to engage and educate throughout the COVID crisis and beyond. Companies that use text messaging, a.k.a. SMS (short message system) marketing, report higher engagement and more cost efficiency than those that don’t. While […]

April 23, 2020
April Billpay Numbers Show Middle-Income Earners Now At Risk
Customers who’ve never missed a payment before but suddenly do this month indicate a new swath of people in need of assistance due to COVID-19. Luckily, reaching them with help is possible, through data-driven customer personas. 26 million Americans have applied for Unemployment Insurance (NPR.org) since the coronavirus crisis hit the U.S. The pandemic’s economic […]

April 16, 2020
A Tale of Two Households: Same Annual Income, Drastically Different Lives
Info-rich customer data rings a warning bell for companies, clarifying customers’ level of need during the Coronavirus outbreak and beyond. Two customers may appear, on paper, to be very similar. But scratch the surface and you find that drastic differences exist between them, making it necessary to approach and serve them in extremely different ways. […]

April 9, 2020
COVID-19 Health + Economic Risk Factors Reveal Dangerous Overlap For Already-Vulnerable Groups
A City-by-City Snapshot Of Greensboro, N.C., Cincinnati & Baltimore Risk factors for contracting COVID-19, or losing income because of it, indicate an overlap with risk factors that make a person more likely than others to default on a utility bill, which means those who are already struggling are destined for a deeper struggle ahead. The […]

April 2, 2020
How Utilities Can Protect the Vulnerable Throughout the Coronavirus Crisis
A message from BlastPoint CEO and Co-Founder, Alison Alvarez With the Covid-19 pandemic growing across the globe and in North America, the world is bracing for some major economic shifts. One might think of utility companies, along with Zoom and Netflix, as businesses that can survive this harsh, new environment. People are “social distancing” in […]

March 12, 2020
5 Cities Leading the Battery-Powered Bus Revolution
To see if these 5 cities are still leading the battery-powered bus revolution, check out our 2022 update! BlastPoint’s March 2020 Map of the Month Modernizing public transit toward zero-emission, clean energy takes courage, funding and strategic partnerships among dozens of stakeholders. Yet some cities have figured out how to make battery-electric public buses work […]

March 5, 2020
What is Revenue Operations, and Does it Work for Utility Companies?
A savvy way of thinking about business practices gained traction in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry a few years back. It’s customer centric. It’s strategic. And it requires all functions of a company to revolve around one central goal: revenue. Hence the name, Revenue Operations. Or, if you’re too busy to enunciate all those extra syllables, […]

February 27, 2020
Geospatial Technology for Water, Sewer & Mobility: Q&A with CivicMapper
Water is our most sacred resource, according to Emily Constantine Mercurio, CEO and cofounder of CivicMapper. Leading the Pittsburgh-based technology firm into its fifth year, she and her team put geospatial data to work helping cities better prepare for the future: by improving water and sewer infrastructure and solving mobility problems. Emily Constantine Mercurio, PhD, […]

February 20, 2020
Public EV Charging Seems Risky. Many Brands Offer It Anyway.
Some popular consumer brands rock public EV charging. With plugs available for use outside their stores, they help to drive EV adoption, reduce range anxiety, and take tangible steps toward reaching corporate sustainability goals. But leading the EV pack isn’t always easy. Oftentimes these corporate powerhouses wind up being the subject of scrutiny, mistrust, or even […]
