Low participation often gets diagnosed as a customer problem. It’s almost always a findability and friction problem. And the sooner all of us in the industry admit that, the sooner the numbers start moving.
A utility program manager in the midwest — call her Sarah — has been running her company’s heat pump rebate program for three years. The program is well-funded. The rebate is competitive: $800 for qualifying equipment, stackable with federal credits. She’s run two awareness campaigns. She’s worked with contractors. She’s refreshed the landing page twice.
Participation is at 5 percent of eligible customers. It has been at 5 percent for two years.
When her VP asks why, the conversation almost always drifts toward the same explanations. Customers don’t know about it. Customers are waiting for better equipment prices. Customers are skeptical of the upgrade economics. Customers, in other words, are the variable. The program is fine. The customers are the problem.
Here is what that explanation gets wrong: a 5 percent participation rate is not a customer verdict on heat pumps. It is a customer verdict on the experience of trying to get a rebate.
Those are not the same thing. And until program owners start treating them differently, participation rates will keep sitting exactly where they are.
Let’s put this in real-world terms. Imagine if Home Depot said to all of its customers needing a new water heater “We’ll give you $800 cash in your pocket if you buy a HPWH”. Any customer in need of a water heater would clamor for the cash. But when it’s buried in educational program pages… not so much.
The diagnosis the industry keeps getting wrong
When a utility program underperforms, the post-mortem follows a predictable script. Awareness was too low. The rebate amount wasn’t compelling enough. The target customer segment was harder to reach than expected. The solution is usually some version of more: more ME&O (marketing, education & outreach) a slightly higher rebate, a new campaign.
What rarely makes it into the post-mortem is the experience of the customers who actually tried.
Not the customers who didn’t know the program existed — the ones who did know, who were interested, who got close enough to attempt enrollment, and then gave up. That cohort is almost never studied. Their dropout point is almost never mapped. The reasons they stopped are almost never collected in any systematic way.
They just become part of the participation gap. Another percentage point between what was possible and what actually happened.
This is a measurement problem masquerading as a customer problem. You can see who enrolled. But you can’t easily see who tried and failed, or who intended to try and encountered enough friction in the first thirty seconds that they never started. So the data that reaches you and your teams makes the program look like it reached its ceiling with motivated customers. What it actually shows is the ceiling of the program’s usability.
A 5 percent participation rate isn’t a customer verdict on the program’s value. It’s a customer verdict on the experience of trying to claim it. Those are not the same diagnosis.
What ‘not valuing the program’ actually looks like
Customer disengagement from incentive programs has a texture that’s worth describing precisely, because the industry tends to flatten it into a single data point — did they enroll, or not?
The customer who ‘doesn’t value the program’ is often not indifferent to the rebate. She is a homeowner who went to the utility website, found a page that listed the rebate amount but not the eligibility requirements, clicked through to a PDF application, realized she needed a contractor, called various contractors, couldn’t make much progress, and decided to deal with it later.
Later never comes. The window closes. The rebate goes unclaimed. In the program’s data–she’s a non-participant.
Or: he’s a customer who found out about the program from a neighbor, went online, discovered that his equipment — installed eighteen months ago — doesn’t qualify because the program only covers installations from the past twelve months. There’s no explanation of why. No alternative program suggested. No next step. Just a wall. He tells his neighbor the program is a hassle. His neighbor doesn’t try.
Or: she’s a homeowner who knows exactly what equipment she wants and is ready to act, but finds herself trapped in a digital scavenger hunt. She lands on a main program page and is met with ten pages of dense educational materials, complex engineering specs, and exhaustive equipment lists. Somewhere in that wall of text is the “Apply Now” button, but it is so deeply buried amongst the copy and nested menus that after five minutes of searching, she assumes the program is either closed or not meant for her. She closes the tab, the rebate goes unclaimed, and in the program’s data, she is simply marked as an “uninterested” non-participant.
These are not customers who don’t value the program. These are customers who encountered a program that didn’t value their time.
The customer who ‘doesn’t value the program’ usually tried. She hit a wall —a buried CTA, a labyrinth of educational PDFs, or an eligibility requirement hidden deep within technical jargon. She’s not a data point. She’s a design failure.
The difference between those two framings is everything. One puts the problem with the customer. The other puts the problem where it actually is: in the design, the communication, and the operational experience of the program itself.
The standard you’re being judged against — whether you know it or not
Customers who interact with your incentive programs in 2026 are not comparing their interaction with your incentive programs from 2015. They are comparing them to every other digital experience they’ve had recently.
They checked their bank balance this morning in eleven seconds. They returned an Amazon order yesterday without talking to anyone. They scheduled a medical appointment through an app at 10pm. They booked a flight, got a confirmation, tracked the itinerary, and received a boarding pass — all without friction and mostly without thinking about it.
Then they come to your y website to find a rebate. They find a static page last updated in Q3 2024. They find an application that requires a PDF download. They find an eligibility section that references a program rule that links to a document that no longer exists.
They are not comparing this to the experience they had with you from five years ago, which was worse. They are comparing it to the bank app, the Amazon return, the medical scheduler. And the gap between those experiences and the incentive program experience is large enough that it registers not as a utility failing to keep up, but as the utility not caring enough to try (this also crushes your CSAT & JD Power scores).
JD Power’s utility customer satisfaction data has tracked this dynamic for years. Customers consistently rate digital experience and ease of program access as primary drivers of satisfaction — and consistently rate utilities near the bottom of any cross-industry comparison that includes retail, banking, or healthcare digital products. The utilities at the top of JD Power rankings are not the ones with the highest rebate amounts. They are the ones whose programs are easiest to find and navigate.
Customers aren’t comparing your incentive program to other utility programs. They’re comparing it to Amazon. That’s not unfair. That’s just what a decade of consumer internet did to expectations — in every industry, including yours.
This is not an argument that utilities should be Amazon. It is an argument that the experience gap between what customers encounter in every other part of their digital lives and what they encounter trying to claim a rebate is now wide enough to be a participation driver on its own. The rebate could be $2,000. If the path to claiming it is opaque, slow, and inconsistent, a meaningful share of customers will decide the friction isn’t worth it.
The design failures that keep showing up
Program usability failures are not random. They cluster around a handful of consistent patterns that show up across utilities, across states, and across program types. They’re worth naming specifically because naming them is the first step toward fixing them.
Eligibility information that is incomplete or buried. Most utility rebate pages lead with the rebate amount — the number that looks compelling in a headline. The eligibility requirements, which determine whether that number is relevant to a given customer, are often several clicks away, written in program language (legal and engineering) rather than plain terms, or scattered across multiple documents. A customer who spends ten minutes exploring a rebate page and discovers on the fourth click that she doesn’t qualify has not had a neutral experience. She has had a frustrating one. She will not try again soon.
No cross-program visibility. A customer eligible for a utility rebate, a state efficiency program, and a federal tax credit currently encounters total silence regarding how these incentives work together. Utilities rarely surface relevant state or federal rebates alongside their own, nor do they cross-promote related utility programs that could benefit the same customer. This leaves the user to navigate separate silos that fail to flag sequencing issues or explain how to stack incentives for maximum savings. Providing this integrated view is a massive opportunity for brand affinity that the industry is currently ignoring; customers want to see the full financial picture in one place, but utilities continue to leave them to figure it out on their own.
Application processes designed for administrators, not applicants. Many utility rebate applications were designed by program administrators optimizing for their internal data collection needs. They require information in formats that are convenient for the utility to process, not convenient for customers to provide. They ask for contractor license numbers, AHRI certification codes, and equipment model numbers in specific formats — information the customer doesn’t have memorized, may not have easy access to, and may not know she needs to gather before starting the application.
Silence after submission. The post-submission experience for most utility rebate programs is a void. An application goes in. The customer has no idea what happens next, how long it will take, or what would cause it to be rejected. Six weeks of silence followed by a check — or six weeks of silence followed by a rejection letter — is not a customer experience. It’s an administrative process that customers happen to be involved in.
Most incentive program applications were designed for administrators, not applicants. They collect the data the utility needs in the format the utility prefers. The customer’s experience was not part of the design brief.
What changes when you treat participation as a design problem
The utilities that have moved participation rates — genuinely moved them, not by three-tenths of a percentage point but by enough to matter for DSM targets — have almost all done something similar. They have stopped treating low participation as a customer education problem and started treating it as a product design problem.
The intervention looks different when you frame it that way. Instead of a new awareness campaign, you do customer journey mapping — you follow the actual path a customer takes from first awareness to submitted claim, and you find where they drop off. Instead of a bigger rebate, you reduce the number of steps between eligible and enrolled. Instead of another FAQ page, you build a guided experience that surfaces the right information at the right moment rather than requiring the customer to find it.
The results are measurable and they show up quickly. When PNM redesigned the navigation experience for its Home Electrification Program, simplifying the application flow and adding real-time eligibility confirmation, program participation increased within the first quarter of the redesign. The rebate amount didn’t change. The marketing budget didn’t increase. The experience did.
When a mid-size northeastern utility piloted a guided incentive discovery tool that walked customers through eligibility across its fourteen active programs — rather than requiring customers to navigate each program separately — incremental incentive deployment increased by more than $1.8 million in less than 6 months. The programs already existed. The money was already allocated. The change was in the navigation layer between customers and the programs they qualified for.
These aren’t outliers. They’re what happens when program design takes customer experience seriously as an input rather than treating it as someone else’s problem.
The question program managers should be asking
The standard question after a flat participation quarter is: how do we get more customers to engage with the program?
That’s the wrong starting point. It positions the program as a fixed object and the customer as the variable that needs to change. It leads to interventions — more marketing, more outreach, more education — that treat awareness as the binding constraint when the binding constraint is usually something else entirely.
The better question is: what happens when a customer tries to use this program?
Not in theory. Not in the program design documents. In practice, on the actual website, on a Tuesday evening, with a contractor’s quote on the kitchen table and twenty minutes to spare before the kids need to be in bed.
Does the eligibility information tell her in plain terms whether her project qualifies? Does the application take fifteen minutes or forty-five? Does she get a confirmation that her submission was received? Does she know what happens next and when?
If the answer to any of those questions is ‘no’ or ‘we’re not sure,’ the participation problem has a location. It’s not in the customer’s awareness or motivation. It’s in the experience the program is delivering — or failing to deliver — at the exact moment when a willing customer is trying to act.
Stop asking how to get more customers into the funnel. Start asking what happens when they try to get through it. The answer will tell you more about your participation rate than any awareness study ever will.
That shift in framing — from customer problem to program problem — is uncomfortable. It means accepting that flat participation is not just bad luck or a hard market. It means accepting that something about the program itself is turning away customers who were willing to engage.
But it’s also the framing that leads somewhere actionable. Customer motivation is hard to move. Program usability is an engineering problem. It has solutions. And those solutions, unlike awareness campaigns, compound over time — every customer who has a good experience tells someone. Every contractor who stops dreading the paperwork starts recommending the program again.
The customers aren’t the problem. The path is the problem.
And paths can be fixed.
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Sources
JD Power U.S. Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, 2023–2024.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Utility Energy Efficiency Program participation benchmarks and dropout analysis.
Rocky Mountain Institute, electrification program friction and contractor time-cost analysis.
IRS Statistics of Income, Energy Credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, 2023 tax year.
Duke Energy, Home Energy Improvement Program redesign results, 2023.
U.S. Department of Energy, HEEHRA program guidance and participation data.