I spend less than $10 per week on electricity usage. I am two weeks away from the end of my first billing period with a new retailer. The predicted bill amount is $289.39. I am predicting my bill will be closer to $170. I am in the industry, so I get why this has happened. The retailer has a lack of history on my usage, and the analytics engine has probably included my initial connection fee as usage.
I love the idea of a predicted bill service. It’s one of those services that can add enormous value to customers managing to a budget. The issue I have is when it gets the prediction so wrong. If there is a lack of data to make a realistic prediction, then just tell the customer. The risk of delivering inaccurate predictions is a loss of credibility in the service that will lead to no-one using it.
I congratulate this retailer for making this service available to me; I would just encourage them to spend a little more time making sure it is accurate enough to be useful.