The Problem

In January 2018, Chartwell, Inc. decided the company wanted to redefine the focus of its Leadership Councils. These councils were focus groups comprised of executives from electric, gas, and water utilities to discuss common challenges in the utility industry and identify potential solutions they could implement to address these challenges. Each council was organized and facilitated by a Senior Research Analyst from Chartwell who set and framed topics of discussion, performed research, moderated conversation, and wrote summaries and reports of the discussion results and the solutions which emerged. This project was focused on the framing of topics and conduct of research, as the nature of the leadership councils required a large amount of preparation time and an agenda set out annually. 

Chartwell is a research and advisory firm serving the North American utility sector, working with hundreds of electric, gas, and water utilities. Leadership Councils are premium research group offerings for senior and executive-level professionals, including directors, VPs, and C-suite leaders.

At the time of this project, councils typically included a user base representing a mix of:

~65% investor-owned utilities

~20% municipal utilities

~15% cooperatives and other utility types


The Plan

The goal of this company-wide project was two-fold. First, we would engage with existing council members to understand the strengths and potential areas for opportunity within the councils. Second, we would interview non-council members to understand what they might seek in potential council membership and understand how we might adjust the council topics, scheduling, and the delivery of information but during council meetings and in the resulting research products to increase sales of the council product. The questions this project sought to answer were:

  1. What changes could we make to the Leadership Council structure and execution to improve user experience, increase user satisfaction, and maximize user retention?

  2. What changes could we make to the content of Leadership Councils to appeal to prospective users and encourage them to become users themselves?

The first step was identifying the methods to be used in this project. As we were primarily concerned with how current and prospective customers viewed the value proposition of the Leadership Councils and how satisfied they were with their user experience. I aimed for a group of 7-10 current users and 3-5 prospective users who were users of other Chartwell products and thus had some understanding of the council product. Chartwell’s user personas differentiated user groups by the size and type of their utilities, as these were the factors that generally made all the difference in what needs different users had. I aimed for a mix of users for interviews that was representative of the proportions of our customer base, which was roughly 20% smaller municipal utilities, 65% large investor-owned utilities (IOUs), and 15% cooperatives and other utility forms. The final list was:

  • 5 IOUs

  • 2 Municipal utilities

  • 1 Cooperative

The prospective user pool for interviews was one user from each persona. 

Once I identified these users, I moved to designing the questions for the interviews. As with any survey or interview design, I wanted to ask questions that both got to the heart of the needs of the user and enabled me to tell a compelling story to internal and external stakeholders.

Questions and methodology

The second step before scheduling interviews with this identified group was designing the questions I would ask to conduct this research project. I chose to write roughly 75% of these questions as qualitative to gauge the customer opinions of the council offerings, which the remaining 25% being quantitative to better quantify the results and tell a more clear and cohesive story for management.

The Results

Results and outcome

The overall results were encouraging to Chartwell leadership. We found that the existing council members had overwhelmingly positive feedback. All 8 of the existing users, regardless of persona, rated the council a 4 or 5 on every metric. In addition, they provided helpful verbatims for what they would like to see in future council content:

“We’d like to see more content on arrears management” - IOU respondent

“A lot of our community members are struggling with keeping up with their balances” - Municipal utility respondent 

“We are looking to launch an app soon and would like to understand what successes and challenges others have found in that space” - IOU respondent

“What are best practices in bill redesign?” - Co-op respondent


These verbatim responses allowed us to adjust content planning for the remainder of 2018 and would, a few years later, lead to the creation of a separate council for vulnerable customers that focused heavily on arrears management.

Prospective non-user responses focused heavily on the desire to know what utilities which shared their size and structure were doing and what challenges and successes they were seeing in their work. By understanding this as a crucial part of the council’s value proposition, I was able to work with sales and marketing to adjust our strategy based on these findings, and by December 2018 the Billing and Payment Leadership council had grown 50% from December 2017.