Inside the mind of today’s home heating oil customer... Continued from p. 8 enhances the brand and gives those vulnerable customers permission to stay with oil rather than go through the hassle and cost of converting. convertvote. • Age of customer: We have the 55 and older vote. If we want to win the election, we need to focus much more on those who are younger. • Time in home: The data confirms that every time someone moves into an oil-heated home, our risk of losing them goes up dramatically in the first several years. Efforts to focus on property transfers, realtors, etc. appear to be well-grounded. • Age of equipment: In an interesting paradox, the percentage of customers who said they thought about converting did not vary much with respect to the age of their equipment. In other words, it didn’t matter whether you had a five year-old system or a 15 year-old unit. But when we asked those who weren’t planning to convert to specify why, “My equipment has a lot of life left,” was the number two reason. We suspect it is one of those cases where if they really start looking into it, the younger the equipment, the less likely they are to act on their desire. • Expected break even: Not surprisingly, the customers who are extremely likely to convert also have expectations of the fastest payback, and voice little tolerance for slower return on investment. Since reality is contradicting that expectation, we win by focusing on this. • Financing: Roughly half of consumers expect to finance their next heating system purchase. Therefore, Most important & contributing reasons for converting... having financing options for oil system upgrades is critical. • Joint or individual decision makers: In homes with only one decision maker, there is a bigger inclination to convert away from oil. Who will provide better service? What doesn’t really matter • How much customers like doing business with a local oil company vs. a utility: The industry does a great job taking care of its customers, and it shows in the very high satisfaction numbers. Only 4% report that they are dissatisfied in any way, but customer satisfaction is not enough to keep them with oil. First, only 27% of respondents believe their oil company provides better service than the local utility. Sixteen percent actually thought the utility would do a better job. The rest called it even. And only 3% identified “doing business with my local oil company” as a primary reason they didn’t plan to convert. Compare that with 33% who cited the up-front cost of conversion as a primary deterrent. The bottom line: even though we want to harp on the virtues of doing business with local, family-owned oil companies vs. the big, bad utilities, there’s very little water in that well. • Environmental concerns about other fuels (fracking, methane leaks, coal burning power plants, etc.): Consumers are largely Most important & contributing reasons for not converting... 26 ICM/Sept/Oct 2015
ICM September-October 2015
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