Once a year, the whole Amber team comes together from across Australia and overseas for AmberCon. It’s two days of keynotes, workshops, big conversations and, this year, a bit of billy kart building and an escape room thrown in for some extra team building.
But ask around afterwards and one session comes up again and again as a favourite: the customer panel.
This year, we put four Amber customers on stage in front of more than 240 people from across the company and asked them to tell us exactly what they thought.
Not just what they love. What frustrates them. What they wish we’d fix. What they think we should be doing differently.
They took us at our word.
As panellist Sarah Aubrey put it on stage, what she likes about Amber is that “it is much more consumer-focused, customer-focused. It’s not about profiting off the customer by, you know, horrible tariffs and silly daily charges.”
And that’s really why we do this.
There’s a big difference between reading customer feedback in a survey or a Slack channel and hearing it directly, in person, with the entire company in the room. Our customers use Amber every day. They notice the things we get right, the things that could be better, and often the things we hadn’t thought of at all.
For an hour at AmberCon, they get the floor.
Meet the panel
This year’s panel brought together four very different Amber households:
- Tom (SA): V2G customer, with no rooftop solar or home battery
- David (NSW): fully electric home with solar and a battery
- Sarah (NSW): solar and battery owner, and founder of Electrify This
- Scott (VIC): apartment living with solar and a battery
Between them, they’d been with Amber for anywhere from three months to six years. That gave us perspectives from someone still getting to know Amber through to customers who have watched the product, company and energy market change enormously over time.
The good stuff
There was plenty we were proud to hear.
Back in 2023, we credited a batch of Tesla battery customers after some technical bumps. Scott wrote back at the time: “This hasn’t cost me anything. Your communication has been worth more than $19, please don’t credit my account.”
Three years later, he was sitting on stage at AmberCon.
When asked why he spends some of his spare time answering questions and advocating for Amber in online communities, he didn’t hesitate.
“There’s an altruistic element... But there’s also personal benefit. I want you to succeed as a company.”
David’s reason for sticking with Amber came back to something even bigger.
“I like your mission. I like the fact that when I use power, I’m actually buying it at times that’s helping the grid. Whereas if I joined [somewhere else], that’s not true anymore.”
For us, that’s a big part of what makes Amber customers different. Saving money matters, obviously. But many of our customers also understand that when thousands of households shift when they use, store and sell electricity, they’re participating in a much bigger change to how Australia’s energy system works.
And the stuff we needed to hear
A customer panel isn’t particularly useful if everyone leaves feeling comfortable.
David called out something we know we could be better at: showing customers how much is actually changing behind the scenes.
“I want people to think Amber are working on this, which you are, but we don’t hear about it.”
It’s a fair call. Our product and engineering teams are constantly shipping improvements, fixing problems and working on what comes next. But customers don’t sit in our Slack channels or product meetings. If we don’t tell them what’s changing, they have no way of knowing.
Tom, our newest panellist at just three months with Amber, had already seen some of that pace firsthand.
“I can see the front’s changed about four times... and I can see it’s making smarter things.”
The challenge for us is making more of that work visible, and making it easier for customers to understand not just what Amber does today, but what’s getting better.
Less than 24 hours later...
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The next day, the Amber team kicked off an internal hackathon. People from across the company broke into teams to build and test ideas that could make Amber better.
Three out of the twelve groups independently started working on the exact problem David had raised on stage.
Their ideas explored different ways to show customers what we’re working on behind the scenes, what’s being improved and what could be coming next.
Nobody had assigned them the problem. There wasn’t a brief telling people to go and solve it. Less than 24 hours after hearing directly from a customer that we needed to communicate our progress better, three groups of Amber people had independently decided it was worth tackling.
To be clear, nothing from the hackathon is live yet. These were experiments, not finished features but we’re working on it.
Putting customers in front of the whole company means the people designing, building and improving Amber get to hear their experiences firsthand. Our engineers hear it. Our product teams hear it. Our customer team hears it. Our marketing team hears it. Our leadership hears it.
All at the same time.
Amber has changed enormously since our earliest customers joined us, and it’ll keep changing as batteries, EVs, V2G and home energy automation become a much bigger part of Australia’s electricity system.
The best way we know to build for that future is to keep the people actually living with the technology close to the people building it.
Sometimes that means hearing exactly what we hoped to hear.
And sometimes it means hearing what we needed to hear.
