The bill went up.
Nobody said why.
So they call you.
A power bill arrives higher than last month, and the bill itself explains the amount without explaining the reason. This demonstrates the alternative: the reason assembled from the customer’s own usage, with one question that settles what the data cannot.
“A bill tells you what you owe. It almost never tells you what happened.”
Tidewatt Energy · an invented exampleThe gap between the bill and the reason
A bill lands eighteen percent up. The customer does not know whether that is the weather, the heat pump, the new flatmate, or a fault. What they do know is that the number is bigger and nobody has explained it. So they ring, and the person who answers starts from nothing.
Every energy retailer holds half-hourly usage data and weather for the same period. The customer holds the one fact neither of those contains — who was in the house. Nobody asks them, because nothing is listening during the wait.
What happens now
A number with no story. The contact centre reconstructs the explanation one call at a time.
What it costs
Bill shock is the single biggest driver of switching in the category, and it is an explanation problem.
What the concept does
Assembles the reason from their own usage, asks the one thing the data cannot know, and stops.
And the question is the point. One optional question, asked inside the wait, is the only part of this that sends something back the other way. Decline it and the work still gets prepared — just with less of them in it.
One bill. Four explanations.
The same eighteen percent, explained four ways. Nothing changes a tariff, a plan or a payment date — and the accounts that need a person get one instead of a chart.
A template sends the same thing to everyone and changes the name. What matters here is the case that should get something different — or nothing at all.
The rules beside each draft are placeholders. A pilot replaces them with your actual policies. We have not seen those, and this concept does not guess at them.
The checks that run before an explanation is sent
Power is an essential service, and the difference between explaining a bill and lecturing someone is whether anything was listening first.
Drafts are held against the Electricity Authority’s Consumer Care Obligations, the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, and the Privacy Act 2020.
Press run to see what it catches — and what it refuses to produce at all.
The batch, before anything sends
Illustrative and fictional. No production access is requested by this concept.
| Account | Count | Prepared | Waiting on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Usage tracks the cold snap | — | Explanation drafted, no tip attached | CX sign-off | Awaiting approval |
| Household grew this month | — | Explanation drafted after the answer | CX sign-off | Awaiting approval |
| Constant overnight draw | — | Investigation raised, no bill explained | Field investigation | Held — under review |
| Usage falling in cold weather | — | Nothing drafted | A named person | Held — no draft |
| Medically dependent flag | — | Nothing drafted | A named person | Held — no draft |
| Meter read estimated | — | Explanation held | Actual read | Parked |
Counts are blank because this is a demonstrator. There is no Tidewatt, and therefore no accounts.
Every draft carries its own working.
Not a log somebody has to go and find. The provenance travels with the work — what it read, which rules it held, who must approve it, and what it refused to do.
This matters most on the day someone asks why it said what it said.
- Artefact
- Bill explanation — usage tracks the cold snap
- Read
- Invented tariff and usage for an invented retailer · account fields: half-hourly usage, weather for the period, medical-dependency flag, payment history shape. No payment credentials.
- Rules held
- Electricity Authority Consumer Care Obligations · Fair Trading Act 1986 · Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 · Privacy Act 2020
- Refused
- No tariff, plan or payment date was changed. No saving was projected. No explanation was sent to an account showing rationing or carrying a medical-dependency flag. No suspected fault was explained away.
- Approver
- A named person. Unsent until then.
- Prepared
- —
- Reference
- —
What this will never do
It does not send. It prepares, and a named person sends. It does not publish to any channel, commit spend, move money, or make a decision that belongs to a person. It does not pretend to be a person — every draft says it was prepared by a machine and approved by a human.
No production access is requested by this concept.
Scope
In a real engagement: bill explanations for opted-in accounts on one tariff, six weeks. Not pricing, not plan switching, not credit management, not the billing engine.
Access
Half-hourly usage and the field names for medical dependency, payment-arrangement history and meter-read type. No payment credentials. No account records leave your systems.
Scorecard
Explanations that prevented a call. Held cases a person agreed should have been held. Faults caught before a customer paid. And whether a CX lead treats the hardship-held list as their own to-do.
Fail any line of the scorecard and we change the design or stop.
Pick a verb.
Not “book a demo”. Any of these is a real next step, and the third is a perfectly good answer.
What is the one constraint we have got wrong?
Every concept is built from the outside. There is always something about how Tidewatt actually runs that we could not see. One line is enough.
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