Canadian Residential Customer Insights Center

What you get

With the Canadian Residential Customer Insights Survey, you’ll get information on:

• Customers’ attitudes toward and behaviors around conservation and energy-efficiency technologies
• Which customer segments are most likely to participate in your demand-side management programs
• Customer satisfaction and their perceptions of your utility brand
• Customers’ communication preferences and online interactions

Sample insights from the survey

There’s room for improvement in marketing your programs and services, especially related to low-income customers and paperless billing. More than two-thirds of respondents (67%) said they didn’t use any programs or services provided by their utility in the past 12 months. This group cited lack of awareness and information as the top reason for not participating in programs: 29% said they weren’t aware that their utility offered any programs or services and 7% said they couldn’t find any information about the programs offered by their utility. Get more details by reading our blog post How Canadian utilities can help their low-income customers.

Methodology

E Source conducted this survey online in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021. In 2021, we surveyed just over 5,000 Canadian residential customers. We designed the survey, collected the data, and analyzed the results. Each year, we applied fieldwork quotas for gender, age, and income to the survey sample to ensure that the sample is representative of the Canadian population. We then used a postfieldwork weighting scheme to reflect each province’s share of households in the total survey area.