Leaders from TECO Energy and CPS Energy Join BlastPoint Roundtable on Putting Customer Personas to Work

BlastPoint, the customer behavioral intelligence layer for utilities, will host a utility roundtable on November 18, 2026 at 12PM ET titled "Getting Started with Personas: How TECO Energy and CPS Energy are putting customer personas to work."

Building customer personas is the first step in determining how to use them across a utility. The roundtable focuses on the second step: connecting what a utility learns about its customers to affordability programs, arrears outreach and the customer journey.

Amy Lester and Shakedra Peurrung of TECO Energy and Arnold Santayana at CPS Energy, will share their experiences with personas, what they have learned about customers who struggle to pay, and how they are putting those insights to work. Attendees will join a small group of utility leaders to hear from both utilities, share experiences and talk through what it takes to make personas useful beyond the initial research.

A timely conversation

Utilities are being asked to identify and support struggling customers at a time when the data on who those customers are is often thin. According to recent Chartwell research, 38% of utilities leverage energy burden analysis to identify vulnerable customers.

At the same time, prices have climbed. BlastPoint's PressurePoint tool, which scores the affordability pressure facing each utility's customers by combining public rate data with local poverty rates, shows:

• Electric: The average U.S. residential electricity price rose 27% from 2019 to 2024, faster than inflation at 23% (CPI-U). At the typical investor-owned utility PressurePoint tracks, it rose 26%.
• Gas: At the typical gas utility PressurePoint tracks, the average residential price per unit rose about 30% from 2019 to 2024. Nationally, EIA shows a 38% increase per thousand cubic feet..
• Two kinds of pressure: Affordability pressure in the South is driven by poverty; on the coasts the data shows that it’s driven by price. .
• Disconnections: In 2024, Southern utilities disconnected residential customers at about five times the Northeast's rate, roughly 17 disconnections per 100 residential customers compared with about 3.
• Customers feel it: SECC's 2026 national survey found 31% of Americans struggled to pay an electric bill in the past year, and 48% of low-income households did.

Register

Hosted by BlastPoint’s Alison Alvarez, the roundtable is designed for utility leaders working on customer experience, affordability programs and arrears outreach. Register for the webinar.