The hidden cost of utility customer vulnerability

Everyone's feeling the cost of staying warm, cool and connected right now. So when utility bills arrive in mailboxes and inboxes, a lot of emotions are triggered and not many are good ones.

Affordability struggles used to be isolated cases touching predictable demographics. That’s no longer true. Vulnerability is showing up in households that never used to struggle and utilities aren't set up to see them coming.

This isn’t a one-customer, one-moment problem anymore. It’s collective and widespread. Add enough of these moments together and the pressure cascades across departments: a finance problem with rising collections, a customer support problem with higher call volume, an operations problem with disconnected workflows and an IT problem with platform strain.

Right now, 69% of customers say their utility isn't doing enough to help the less fortunate pay their bills.¹ That gap between what utilities think they're doing and what customers actually feel is what needs fixing.

The numbers

Pinched, squeezed and pressured are words consumers use to describe how they’re feeling and the numbers back it up:

• 1 in 6 U.S. families is behind on utility bills.
• 31% frequently worry about how they'll pay.²
• 38% say their economic situation has worsened in the past 12 months.³

Despite implementing programs and solutions to alleviate some of the burden, utilities are managing a problem that customers already think is mishandled. That gap between perception and reality needs to be addressed now that vulnerability is a systemic reality, not a fringe operational issue. Treating this as a "collections problem" is operating on outdated assumptions.

Why departments feel it differently

The first department affected is almost certainly customer support, because stressed-out, vulnerable customers call the call center. These aren’t easy calls. They require time, patience and empathy.

Customers who don’t call or are really underwater may not pay their bills at all, impacting finance through non-payments and write-off risk.

It trickles into operations, with manual case handling and disconnect/reconnect cycles. IT isn’t spared either. Payment and self-service tools built for simple transactions now have to handle income-based plans, assistance enrollment and eligibility checks, they weren’t designed for.

What was once an isolated collections problem has become cross-functional. These symptoms may look unrelated, but they’re all fueled by the same root cause: a reactive, siloed approach to billing and payment moments.

The real disconnect: Awareness, not apathy

This is not a hit piece on utilities. They’ve done the work, implementing programs for rate relief, rebates and enrollment pathways. The problem isn’t a lack of programs; it’s a gap in awareness. About 40% of lower-income customers don't know assistance exists,⁴ and there’s a similar gap for efficiency programs. That awareness gap is compounded by a channel mismatch, where 53% of customers prefer email, but utilities favor on-bill messaging, which only 51% of customers say they sometimes read.⁵

The programs are there. Utilities just aren’t reaching their customers through the right channels.

A five-pillar framework for closing the gap

Developed through Chartwell's Vulnerable Customer Leadership Council, this five-pillar framework isn't about launching another program. It's about connecting the ones that exist. Most utilities run these five functions in silos, which is why they keep failing customers. Orchestrated together, they stop being separate initiatives and start building the one thing that's been missing: trust.

Identification flags at-risk customers early through predictive analytics, catching them before nonpayment even happens, not after.

Engagement closes the awareness gap through community partnerships and streamlined enrollment, so "I didn't know this existed" stops being the norm.

Payment and credit replaces the disconnect/reconnect cycle with income-based plans and load-limiting technology.

Assistance resources removes the navigation burden with a single point of access rather than five programs across five pages.

Cultural and language awareness closes equity gaps through multilingual, multicultural partnerships that meet customers where they are.

The result is that customers feel supported before the crisis hits, instead of being managed after delinquency has already started.

From reactive to ready

The question isn't if this hits your organization. It's which department feels it first.

Closing the gap takes more than surveys and NPS scores. It takes community co-design, real conversations about how people actually live and trusted intermediaries who can reach the customers your channels can't.

Four departments. One customer moment. The utilities getting ahead of this aren't waiting for the crisis to arrive; they're redesigning the journey before it breaks. And the ones who treat affordability as a cross-functional priority now will set the standard everyone else gets measured against.

For a deeper look at the data behind rising customer vulnerability — and what utilities can do to turn affordability challenges into trust-building moments — get your copy of Affordability & Trust: The Utility Industry at a Crossroads (Part 1).