Amazon told your customers what the experience should feel like. They listened. Then they went to your utility website to find a rebate for a heat pump — and gave up in four minutes.
That’s not an awareness problem. It’s a comparison problem. And the comparison isn’t fair, but it’s the one your customers are making every time they visit.
The bar was set by someone who had nothing to do with your industry. But your customers hold you to it anyway.
The experience transfer is already done
Here’s the uncomfortable reality utilities rarely say out loud: the consumer patience threshold is set by their last-best digital experience — not their last utility interaction.
It takes 30 seconds to reorder a product on Amazon. 45 seconds to find a Netflix show. 60 seconds to book an Uber. When those same people sit down to find a utility rebate — navigating three separate PDF links, a form that requires their account number from a bill they’ve already recycled, and a 6–8 week processing timeline — they don’t give your program credit for existing.
They bounce. And they don’t come back.
This isn’t about being “like Amazon”
Utilities don’t need to be Amazon. They don’t need to be Netflix. The programs are different, the stakes are different, and the regulatory context is genuinely more complex.
But complexity is an internal constraint. It’s not something customers should see.
When customers can’t find what they’re eligible for, can’t figure out how to apply, and can’t tell whether they’ll ever hear back — they’ve experienced your complexity. That’s the problem. Not the complexity itself.
Complexity is an internal constraint. It’s not something customers should see.
The data makes it worse
Utilities aren’t oblivious to this. JD Power satisfaction scores consistently flag digital and self-service experience as the biggest drivers of utility dissatisfaction. Not reliability. Not rates. The experience of trying to interact digitally.
At the same time, there’s roughly $1 billion in utility incentive funding going unclaimed every year — not because customers don’t want the programs, but because finding and accessing them is too hard.
These two data points are the same problem. A participation gap that looks like a marketing problem is almost always a UX problem in disguise.
What “easier” actually looks like
The fix isn’t a redesigned PDF. It isn’t a push notification campaign. It isn’t adding another “rebates” tab to a website that already has nine of them.
Easier means: a customer types in their address and zip code and gets back a clear, specific list of what they qualify for — from their utility, their state, and federal programs — without having to know what to search for first.
Easier means: the path from “I found it” to “I applied” takes minutes, not days.
Easier means: customers who were never going to call a hotline can still find and use the program you already funded.
The program already exists. The funding is already there. The customer already wants it. The only thing standing between all three is the experience.
The regulated industry blind spot
There’s a predictable response to this argument in regulated industries: “We’re not a consumer tech company. Our customers understand we operate differently.”
They don’t. Or more precisely — they do understand it, and they’re frustrated by it anyway.
The Amazon effect doesn’t require customers to forget that utilities are regulated entities. It just means that when something is hard to use, customers have a reference point for how un-hard it could be. And that reference point is merciless.
The utilities that are closing the participation gap have stopped using regulatory complexity as an explanation for bad UX. They treat it as a constraint to work around — not a reason customers should lower their expectations.
The question worth asking
If a customer who already wants your program can’t find it in under two minutes, whose problem is that?
The honest answer: it’s yours. And there’s about $1 billion in annual unclaimed incentives to prove it.
Want to see what happens when finding a rebate takes 60 seconds instead of 60 minutes? Book a call with Incenva.
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