Hydro Ottawa is a utility company that services over 332,000 customers. They implemented the LoginRadius customer identity platform to modernize their digital customer experience and enable new interactive channels like a mobile app and voice services on Google Home and Alexa. This centralized customer data and single sign-on capabilities, allowing customers to easily access their account information and track electricity usage. It also supported developing new features faster and gave insights into customer behavior.

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“Hey Google, Open Hydro Ottawa”
Trailblazing Utility Modernizes Identity with Innovative Customer Channels
CASE STUDY

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Hydro Ottawa is a regulated electricity local distribution company in eastern
Ontario. As the third largest municipally owned electric utility in Ontario, Hydro
Ottawa maintains one of the safest, most reliable, and most cost-effective electricity
distribution systems in the province. They serve about 332,000 residential and
commercial customers across 1,116 square kilometres.
Improving the experience of their customers is Hydro Ottawa’s central business
strategy under their vision to become “a leading partner in a smart energy future.” As
a result, they decided to take on more innovative digital projects so customers could
enjoy the sort of digital experience they’re used to online.
The results include an award-winning mobile application and a smart speaker
solution. Hydro Ottawa is the first utility company in Canada to offer voice-activated
customer service through both Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By focusing on their
customers’ needs, the trailblazers at Hydro Ottawa are giving people more ways to
interact with their electricity accounts through their channel of choice. They have fully
disrupted the Canadian utility industry for the better.
About
the utility

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Moving toward single sign-on (SSO)
The Hydro Ottawa team wanted to create a solid architectural foundation for digital
growth and innovation. They decided that the core of this new system would be a
customer identity solution that centralizes and unifies customer identity data.
With the launch of their mobile app and a revamp of their customer web portal
underway, Hydro Ottawa needed an SSO solution so their customers could log in with
a single profile that also included social media validation.
Migrating 150,000 customers to a new identity platform
About 50% of Hydro Ottawa’s customers have an online account. These accounts
needed to be migrated to the new platform. With the help of LoginRadius, Hydro
Ottawa was able to transition and migrate over 150,000 customer accounts flawlessly,
with little to no disruption in service.
Keeping data secure
The customer identity solution had to align with Hydro Ottawa security standards,
and LoginRadius was an ideal fit. Through the LoginRadius Dashboard, a self-service
administration console, Hydro Ottawa can safely and securely troubleshoot login or
registration issues with ease and in real time.
Goals

4. Secure infrastructure with centralized customer data to build on
By implementing the LoginRadius customer identity solution, Hydro Ottawa offers
their customers a secure, streamlined login and registration system. Single sign-on
(SSO) capabilities removed the previous accessibility barriers.
With SSO, customers can move seamlessly through different Hydro Ottawa web
applications without needing to sign up or log in again. Customers can easily access
their accounts online to see their electricity usage and billing activities.
Hydro Ottawa took advantage of centralized customer profiles and unified customer
data in LoginRadius to get a better understanding of their customers’ online behavior.
These insights will have a big influence on direction as they move forward with their
product innovation strategy.
Award-winning mobile application
Having improved the login experience, the team moved on to develop new interactive
channels. By leveraging the identity solution and digital infrastructure already in place,
Hydro Ottawa was able to release an award-winning mobile application. It’s the first
app in North America that lets customers track their household’s electricity usage and
costs, access their billing information, and find out about current power outages using
a single tool.
Results

5. Industry-leading voice assistant skills
Not content with the success of their mobile application, the team was eager to give
their customers even more ways to interact with Hydro Ottawa. The next project
involved smart speaker skills for Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Because the key
identity management infrastructure was already in place, it only took a few weeks to
integrate the smart speaker skills.
Using simple voice commands, customers can ask their Google Home or Alexa about
current electricity rates, power outages, bill information, and tips on how to reduce
electricity usage. This first rollout has laid the groundwork for the team to build more
features into the smart speaker skills, providing Hydro Ottawa customers with an
intuitive smart home experience.
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Password rules
The Hydro Ottawa team, through the LoginRadius Dashboard, customized the
password validation rules to meet their security requirements. For example, they now
enforce password rules that require a minimum length, data type (alphanumeric), and
inclusion of uppercase and special characters.
Single sign-on (SSO)
Before adding new applications and technologies, the Hydro Ottawa team had to
first make sure that their customers could seamlessly access new services. The
LoginRadius SSO capabilities enabled Hydro Ottawa to connect all of their web and
mobile properties in one single accessible portal for their customers. Customers no
longer have to sign in separately as they navigate through various Hydro Ottawa web
applications. They can now browse between properties without interruption.
How did we
do it?
5

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Automated unification of customer data
LoginRadius cloud data storage automatically normalizes and unifies customer data
to remove all data silos. The Hydro Ottawa team always accesses the most up-to-date
and complete customer information from a single database, regardless of when or
how they are retrieving their customer data from LoginRadius. Hydro Ottawa now has
a unified view of who their customers are. They can augment existing customer data
with additional customer data collected through interactions. These richer profiles
lead to increased understanding of customer demographics, questions, and behaviors
for better and more fine-tuned segmentation. The Hydro Ottawa team can then build
even better technology to serve their customers.
Federated SSO with OAuth 2.0
Hydro Ottawa leveraged the LoginRadius OAuth 2.0 capabilities and the LoginRadius
API to build their smart speaker skills with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Thanks
to the identity infrastructure, which addressed the key factors of user authentication,
security, and data storage, Hydro Ottawa was able to build and launch these skills in
a record timeline of three weeks. Throughout this process, the LoginRadius support
team worked tirelessly, troubleshooting issues and questions to make sure the
project succeeded. Hydro Ottawa is now the first utility company in Canada, and
possibly in North America, to launch a successful smart speaker skill that can carry
on a continuous, contextual conversation to inform customers of their account and
billing and educate them on energy conservation.
Custom object
With the use of a custom object, Hydro Ottawa can easily manage relationships
between master accounts and subaccounts directly in LoginRadius. Since accounts
are managed by family, Hydro Ottawa allows their customers to set up a master
account with multiple sub or “child” accounts, which allows family members to access
the same account information with their own credentials. This account relationship
flow is stored in a custom object, and Hydro Ottawa can view and query this
information directly from the LoginRadius Dashboard.
Contact
sales@loginradius.com|Confidential Information|www.loginradius.com
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