ChatGPT for Utilities: Top Prompts to Accelerate Engaging Energy Efficiency Content

At Utility CX Advisors, we advocate for utilities embrace AI in safe and productive ways to improve customer engagement and the digital experience.  Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT help writers by working as a virtual research assistant.  With the right prompts, writers can dramatically improve the velocity and quality of their content to customers on the website and via email campaigns to increase awareness and engagement of utility programs.  With a few basic Prompt Engineering tips, utilities can produce a lot more content tuned specifically to the needs and interests of their customers on key topics like energy efficiency.  Writers use prompts in ChatGPT to produce outlines and drafts that they can rewrite and update so that it best fits the utility style guide and customer objectives.  Best of all, ChatGPT and other LLMs learn as they go, so the drafts and research continually improves and better matches utility writers’ needs.  

It just takes a bit of practice with the proper prompts.  This article gives the Top Tips for writing prompts, with examples that your writers can use to produce some quality content suitable for a website or outreach campaign to customers.  

Define the Objective Clearly: Start your prompt with a clear objective. For instance, if the goal is to increase awareness of energy efficiency among interested customers, try asking ChatGPT to “Create an outline for an article that highlights energy savings tips for customers in the Mid-Atlantic, aiming to boost energy savings opportunities among environmentally conscious consumers.” This type of prompt sets a clear direction for ChatGPT to produce an outline for a potential article that helps writers get started on their content.

Specify Tone and Style: Indicate the desired tone and style to ensure brand consistency. For educational content the prompt could be, “write an informative post suitable for a utility website on the topic of energy saving tips for winter.  The article should be authoritative and credible, and avoid hyperbole, and include specific tips and benefits so that customers are encouraged to learn more about the recommendations.”  Alternatively, social media posts attract the attention of younger customers, so consider a prompt like “write a script for a short animated video suitable for social media like Instagram that helps young professionals see the energy savings benefit of turning down their thermostat in winter months.  Use playful tone and youthful expressions to attract attention from Millenial and GenZ viewers.”  Your writers can adapt the scripts to fit your specific audience based on the initial drafts from the chatbot.

Include Audience Demographics: Make sure to mention who you want to read the content to increase personalization and engagement.  Try “write an outline to help older customers in their retirement years learn the benefit of smart home technology like video doorbells and repair and protection plans to help them remain in their home longer with a bit of extra assistance from the utility.”   You’ll be surprised how easily your Marketing Communication team can adapt those outlines to full articles suitable for an email campaign to your “Aging in Place” customers who want a bit of help Beyond the Meter and will appreciate advice from their utility.

Include a Call-to-Action (CTA): End your prompt with a CTA to guide the desired customer action. For example, “Conclude the article on energy efficiency with a compelling call-to-action encouraging readers to register their smart thermostat with the utility to participate in demand response.” CTAs promotes customer engagement that matches the goals of your content topics and campaigns.  

Here’s an example prompt that should give your MarCom team a good first draft of an article for your website and helps them learn more about ChatGPT. 

“Create a short article suitable for an energy utility website on the topic of energy savings tips that help homeowners get the full value of their smart thermostat.  The tone of the article should be informative and fun, so use an authoritative tone and include realistic benefits customers can expect from their energy savings.  The audience for the article is homeowners who can have recently purchased a smart thermostat, but may not have programmed it for optimal energy savings.  Conclude the article by recommending customers to call the utility to enroll their home in our demand response program to increase their savings and support the resilience of the local community.”

Congratulations, you’ve just done prompt engineering with ChatGPT.  You can adjust the tone and style easily to fit your utility content style guide based on the output from this prompt.  We recommend experimenting with different elements of a prompt to tweak the initial content so that your writers can streamline the content process for maximum effect. Ask ChatGPT for a social post or a blog instead of an article.  Consider the same topic but for different audiences to improve personalization.  Ask ChatGPT to write the subject line and body of an email based on the articles that encourage customers to click a link to read more about the topic on the utility website.  ChatGPT takes some of the drudgery out of the writing process to increase your MarComm team’s ability to engage and inform your customers.  Give it a try in 2024 and accelerate your content outreach success.

To learn more about how your Marketing Communication team can leverage ChatGPT and LLMs to engage customers, or other capabilities of Generative AI to help deliver the Modern Utility CX, please contact us today.

Image created using DALL-E, a product of OpenAI, on January 3, 2024.