For Johnny Whitfield, Vice President of Customer Engagement at OG&E, the conversation about modernizing utility operations starts with the recognition that utilities are often better able to connect with customers when they take off their “utility glasses” and change the conversation from one focused only on kilowatt hours, load and rates.
"At the end of the day, when a person flips the light switch, they expect that light to come on, and they recognize they're paying for that," Whitfield said. "It's important that we're able to speak a language that everyone understands, and then help them make decisions that they feel are best for them so they can continue to do things they enjoy doing."
That orientation, meeting customers where they are rather than asking them to learn utility vocabulary, has become a defining feature of how OG&E now operates. Over the past several years, the company has elevated its operations from being data-rich, with years of smart meter readings collected through its SmartHours program, to being operationally intelligent. The shift was made possible by Bidgely's behind-the-meter intelligence platform, but the strategic vision belongs to OG&E.
The Mindset Shift Behind the Numbers
Utilities have long treated demand-side management as a tradeoff against lost net revenue. Whitfield described the prevailing logic this way. "What business model suggests that you should get people to stop using your product?"
OG&E now answers that question differently. "When you approach it from a growth mindset, you don't see encouraging someone to use less as something that hurts you. It's actually giving you the opportunity to do more," Whitfield said.
With OG&E adding 1.7 gigawatts of capacity by 2029 and another 1.8 gigawatts by 2032 to meet load growth that includes a major hyperscaler contract, helping customers shift load creates headroom for growth that would otherwise require new generation.
Kirby Brinlee, Director of Customer Experience, framed the internal change in equally direct terms. "We've got these capacity needs, and we've got this customer base who can help us with meeting some of those needs. Our team designs and creates programs for customers to engage with that also help the business reach our goals around capacity and demand response."
Performance Data Turned a Mature Program Into a Capacity Resource
The clearest evidence of what that mindset can produce came out of OG&E's flagship time-of-use offering, SmartHours, which now serves more than 100,000 residential customers across Oklahoma and Arkansas on either standard time-of-use, variable peak pricing, or EV-overnight rates. Historically, OG&E could measure SmartHours performance only at the program level. Once they implemented Bidgely's Analytics Workbench, the company gained visibility into how each individual enrolled household was actually performing on the rate.
The data revealed some unexpected findings. Most surprisingly, OG&E learned that approximately 1,000 customers were increasing their energy use by more than 5 kW during peak pricing hours, contributing more than 4 MW of unwanted demand to the peak. Another 8,000 customers were piling on smaller increases of 2 kW or more, adding another 18 MW of misdirected load. These households had not failed to engage with the rate. They had inverted it, treating the peak window as a discount period rather than a premium one.
"They fundamentally misunderstood the rate," said Maddie Emerson, Manager of Product Development and Programs at OG&E. "We changed the visuals we were sharing with customers to communicate the peak pricing and peak period, and we targeted communications throughout the summer season."
After customers received the intervention emails, the high-overage cohort shrank by 73 percent, the smaller-overage cohort shrank by 35 percent, and the entire program saw a 9.2 MW boost in residential demand response impact. Top performers earning a $15 bill credit also stayed enrolled at 4 to 5 percent higher rates than the program average, and 66 percent of those aware of the credit reported making greater efforts to reduce consumption during critical events.
The cumulative SmartHours program delivered 97 MW of summer peak savings last year, hitting 114 percent of OG&E's program target and offsetting roughly $200,000 in traditional demand response incentive costs. The conventional path to that result would have been an incentive program, new in-home hardware, or a broad-based marketing push to grow enrollment. OG&E achieved it by hyper-targeting the specific customers that needed feedback, providing it in a personalized form they could act on, and trusting them to respond.
Engagement Metrics That Outperform the Industry
OG&E's customer-facing work begins with the Bidgely-powered Monthly Summary, which has produced engagement metrics well above industry norms. In response to 5.5 million emails sent in Oklahoma and 262,000 in Arkansas:
"It's one thing for us to tell customers their high bill is attributed to hot Oklahoma summers. It's a different thing when they see their own data, with their name and their bill amount, showing that 30 percent of their bill is going to air conditioning," Brinlee said.
That visibility runs in both directions. OG&E's customer service representatives now have access to the same appliance-level intelligence that consumers receive through Bidgely's CSR Console with High Bill Analyzer, which has changed how agents are able to manage high-bill calls. Where representatives once defaulted to general suggestions about energy efficiency programs, they can now walk a customer through their actual consumption pattern, identify the specific drivers that contributed to the high bill, and suggest a relevant, actionable corrective next step. For non-digitally-engaged customers, those high bill conversations often are the encouragement they need to create their first online account.
The combined effect on program enrollment has also been substantial. After launching Bidgely's Next Best Interaction tool, OG&E moved from generating roughly 50 energy efficiency leads per week to more than 1,000 leads in the first two weeks. The conversion rate from lead to completed installation ran at least double what other engagement channels were producing, Emerson said, because customers were already aware of which appliance was driving their bill and what intervention would help.
OG&E's residential energy efficiency program implementer put it more directly. "If it weren't for Bidgely, we'd have a 6,000 to 7,000 lead deficit. And they're good leads. The people know what they're getting into."
Smarter Targeting, Smarter Program Design
Behind-the-meter intelligence has also reshaped how OG&E decides which programs to build and prioritize. Ryan Jones, Manager of Innovation at OG&E, describes disaggregation as "a value added layer on top of our meter data" that helps the team test whether a program is solving a real problem, whether the solution will actually work, and whether the business case holds up, before resources get committed. The data does not just drive marketing, it informs program design from the start.
OG&E's electric vehicle managed charging exploration offers a useful illustration. Based on vehicle registration data at the zip-code-plus-four level and customer research suggesting that EV owners come home and plug in immediately, the team initially estimated they could realize ~50 MW of potential peak load shifting from a managed charging program. The pilot succeeded with a small cohort.
When it came time to scale, Bidgely's analytics revealed that most EV owners were already charging overnight without any rate signal. Of 7,508 residential customers detected charging during a peak hour over the summer, only 451 were charging during the actual system peak hour, representing 2.52 MW of genuinely shiftable load. Whether those customers were following default OEM charging schedules or were already trained on time-of-use behavior from years of SmartHours awareness remains an open question. Either way, the original 50 MW assumption did not hold.
Jones emphasizes that finding and others like it are not setbacks, they are the kind of finding that improves capital allocation.
"The idea of stopping a program that wouldn't have been as cost effective as we thought it would be, and being able to direct those funds toward more value-added things, is an amazing benefit," Jones said.
In the case of the managed charging program, OG&E was able to sharpen the program's targeting, focus the customer experience on the households that represent real shifting potential, and avoid building against a 50 MW assumption that the data did not support. Instead, OG&E decided to launch a targeted drip campaign to more than 7,000 of those EV-charging households, encouraging conversion to the SmartHours Overnight rate.
The same logic now informs OG&E's broader program portfolio. The company is layering its existing customer segmentation research, which divides residential customers into "Convince Us" households focused on financial savings, "Affluent Techies" oriented toward convenience and technology, and "Contented Seniors" who prioritize stability and small-footprint engagement, onto Bidgely's performance data. The first wave of fully segmented communications begins this summer, with messaging that varies not only by performance category but by the motivation factors most relevant to each segment.
The same disaggregation layer is now starting to inform OG&E's distribution planning. Planning engineers have historically written their own code to slice meter data for system upgrade decisions. With appliance-level intelligence available, OG&E can supplement that work with insight into which loads are driving constraints on which feeders, opening up non-wires alternatives as a credible alternative to traditional infrastructure investment. "It will help us create a more collaborative team work environment between our customer programs and our planning engineers," Jones said.
Reaching the Customers Who Are Easiest to Miss
OG&E has also been deliberate about extending behind-the-meter intelligence to customers who do not engage digitally. Postcards summarizing key insights from Bidgely's High Bill Analyzer are being distributed by mail, with Community Affairs managers incorporating the same visualizations as part of in-person events.
OG&E was also able to create a new customer category as a result of its behind-the-meter intelligence. Thousands of residential customers in OG&E's service territory have secondary structures on their property, such as barns or shops with separate electric service. Those accounts have historically been classified as “general service” by default and treated as businesses in all communications. When OG&E began sending monthly summaries to these customers, they let the utility know the summaries were incorrect, explained what was actually on their property, and engaged with the utility in a way that they had not been inspired to do by previous business-targeted outreach. OG&E has since updated its customer information system to flag those accounts and communicate with them as the residential customers they functionally are.
Estimated $10 Million Estimated Benefit and an Industry Blueprint
The full picture of what Bidgely-powered intelligence is unlocking at OG&E includes an estimated $10 million in annual benefit and more than 25,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent reduced. The largest single contributor is the $8.1 million tied to variable peak pricing and time-of-use coaching, followed by $757,000 from Home Energy Reports and $688,000 from the CSR Console with High Bill Analyzer. Across the platform, 218,000 customers are receiving treatment for energy efficiency programs, projecting more than 1.6 GWh of savings.
Those numbers reflect what happens when a utility invests in turning meter data into customer intelligence and then puts that intelligence to work across the organization. Emerson ranks as the number one power user across all utilities using Bidgely's Analytics Workbench, by monthly downloads, uploads, and saves. OG&E's twelve-month query volume on the platform ranks second across all AWB utilities. That kind of operational adoption is what makes the customer-facing results possible.
What OG&E is demonstrating, across SmartHours, monthly summaries, the CSR Console, Next Best Interaction, and pilot program design, is that for an industry facing simultaneous pressure from load growth, electrification, affordability, and capital constraints, the fastest path forward runs through the customer relationships and meter data utilities already own.