Energy Choice
                            

Matters

Bounce Energy Launches Build Your Own Energy Plan

February 27, 2013

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Copyright 2010-13 EnergyChoiceMatters.com
Reporting by Karen Abbott • kabbott@energychoicematters.com

Bounce Energy is offering customers in Texas the opportunity to build their own energy plan, allowing customers to customize, by answering several questions, the term, renewable content, billing, and payment options of the plan.

Individual pricing will be driven by the customer's selection.

It's another evolution in the market that brings electric choice closer to traditional markets where customers can exercise choice through customization, such as cellular service, said Robbie Wright, CEO of Bounce Energy.

Under the Build Your Own Plan tool, customers may select:

• Term length, from variable to fixed, with 34 different fixed terms available (from 3 months to 36 months and everything in between)

• Green content: 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% and block REC options in addition to standard power

• Auto-pay, yes/no

• Paperless billing, yes/no

• Enrollment Reward, choose from $25 bill credit, $50 Restaurant.com gift card, or $25 Visa gift card

• Ongoing Reward Program, choose from a variety of plans

"A consumer is less likely to churn and less likely to experience buyer's remorse when they are making the decisions themselves. And the only way to do that is to put all the decisions in their hands," Wright told EnergyChoiceMatters.com.

Bounce Energy has been working on the Build Your Own Plan customization since 2011, in response to customer feedback and internal frustration with the lack of actual choice presented in the market.

"Most utility companies are thinking 'this is what I have and this is what I want to sell,' not 'this is what the customer wants,'" Wright said. "Instead of using this old utility mantra of telling customers what they can have, we want them to call the shots."

Wright noted that, previously, customers would be presented with similar offers from all competing REPs (e.g. standard variable and 12/24 term offers), and that customers faced with no differentiation among such products would favor the older brands that they're familiar with.

"We're going to leverage [Build Your Own Plan] as something fundamentally different than what anyone else is doing and the reason why people who haven't looked at us before should be interested in putting the power in their own hands, so to speak."

Currently, Bounce offers the Build Your Own Plan in Texas, where it owns and can customize billing. In other markets, the offering is limited by legacy utility billing systems (including apparently limits on rate codes); additionally, certain factors (auto-pay/paperless) would be inapplicable where a third party bills.

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