There's no single way Europe segments energy customers. Everyone does it a bit differently. Even the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, dropped its old model (the one sorted by things like home type and income) and switched to one based on attitude. 

The reason was that Ofgem cares about whether people engage with the market, and attitudes predicted that better than demographics.

Five useful ways to split the customer base

Retention depends on a few things. These are some useful customer segments when thinking about it:

Engaged vs. inert. Trust here works like a handbrake keeping the inert group from starting to look around.

The one thing that reliably reaches them are triggers, like price shocks and messed-up bills. Regulators count moving house as one of the few natural moments people switch, because setting up supply at a new place forces a decision that inertia would otherwise bury.

We see in our own data that buying an EV is another major trigger. Many people start looking at their energy contracts and switch to get a cheaper rate for charging.

Assets in the home. Solar-plus-storage, heat pumps, EVs. These are generally the most engaged, highest-income and most electrified households. We know them, we like them a lot and treat them as the margin and depth segment. 

Trust helps keep them and it’s also part of what they’re buying. Letting a supplier control your car charging or heat pump is a big ask. It raises the question: do I trust you not to overcharge me while my gear does what you tell to it?

Vulnerability, income, life-stage. Pull the UK competition authority's finding apart and you can see that never-switchers skew older, lower-income, in social housing, with fewer qualifications and they pay by standard credit rather than direct debit.  

Low income means less room to absorb a change going wrong, and sometimes debt that blocks a switch outright. Older customers have longer tenure and do less of their admin online, where comparison and switching now live. Renting or social housing can mean the contract doesn't feel like theirs to move. People with fewer qualifications are often less confident using a comparison site in the first place.

Attitude towards energy. There is indeed a real green segment, but it’s small and country-specific. An eight-country study (Czechia, France, Greece, Spain, Germany, Poland, Romania, the UK) segmented people by motivation to save energy, from ecological idealists at one end to a frankly indifferent, passive group at the other. 

Ecological idealists were the dominant saver segment only in Spain, above 40%; in Poland and Czechia the values-driven group was tiny.

Country / market structure. In Europe, this scrambles everything above. How many people switch suppliers runs from almost zero to about 25%, depending on the country, and a lot of that is by design, not choice. 

Take Spain. Close to a third of households are on the default tariff, the PVPC. Its price changes every hour, so it can count as dynamic. But almost nobody picked it for that, it's just what you get if you don't choose. And people are slowly leaving it, which shows the 'dynamic' label had little to do with choice.

In other countries it’s the reverse. There, the default is one people rarely leave, so switching stays low even among people who’d happily shop around. Move that person to a different country and they will act differently, because the rules are different. 

In tackling churn, strategies that work on one group don’t work on the next. Trust keeps the inert from looking around, but it's a real selling point for the prosumer, and it barely matters to the vulnerable, who are stuck either way. So there's no single answer to ‘what makes people stay.’ It changes from group to group.

The one thing that holds up almost everywhere is the operational ‘more boring’ stuff: easy to reach, clear bills, and a smart meter that works.

Why each group stays

So why do people stay? Is it loyalty or is it inertia?

There are two different things people mean by loyalty, and they have different drivers.

Ask people what makes them stay, and trust usually comes ahead of satisfaction and the cost of switching.

What makes them act (stay or switch) is driven by price and trigger moments. When Ofgem asked people who had just switched why they did it, half said they found a cheaper deal. Only 6% said better service. So trust shapes how people feel about you but price is what makes them move.

Energy is something most people barely think about, and that's exactly why these two split apart. What people feel and what they do don't always line up. And every group sits in a slightly different spot between the two. 

That's what I mean when I say ‘what makes them stay’ has a different answer for each group.

The inert majority: they stay because acting costs more than not acting

For this group, feelings barely come into it. It's almost all about hassle. Across the EU and Norway, fewer than 1 in 10 switch in a year, and roughly three-quarters don't take part in the market at all.

Though it varies a lot by country. In Spain, Italy and Portugal, 20-25% of people switch each year. Sweden and Norway sit at about 9%. And switching rates have been going up. In Great Britain, one of Europe’s most competitive markets, switching in December was 32% higher than the year before.

What keeps them is simple: switching feels like more effort than it's worth. And the payoff can't just be a little better, it has to be big enough to feel worth the bother. A small saving won't move them.

But the hassle is being stripped away by law: switching now takes 24 hours in some countries, and exit fees are mostly being outlawed, except for breaking a fixed-term deal early. The things holding them in place are going away.

Assets in the home: they stay while trust and offer both hold

This is the one group where feelings really do drive the decision. So trust becomes part of what they're buying.

Trust in the brand is the biggest reason this group stays, bigger than how happy they are, bigger than the hassle of leaving. And it matters most in the moment they hand you control of something: their car charging or their heat pump.

A German survey this June found ~60% of EV/heat-pump/solar owners open to dynamic pricing or fixed-price-plus-service, with more preferring the service-wrapped fixed option than raw dynamic. People want the benefit handled for them.

But they're active in every other way too. They shop around, other suppliers chase them, and they have the most ways out. So they're loyal but only up to a point. A better offer can still pull them away.

The values minority: they stay while they believe in their supplier

For this group. It’s almost all about how they feel. Customers on green contracts find trust and satisfaction directly drive loyalty, and trust matters more than usual precisely because green claims are hard for a customer to verify. You mostly have to take the company’s word for it.

The flip side is the exit: when suppliers fail to deliver on green promises, customers lose trust and switch. So this loyalty is deep but brittle. A greenwashing story or a ‘100% renewable’ claim that turns out to be certificates will do a lot of damage.

Income & life-stage

I chose to bundle these together because they overlap a lot. Income changes whether leaving is even possible. For some customers, energy is a small worry sitting under much bigger ones. When money problems take a big part of your life, saving €10 on a bill doesn’t move the needle.

Many prepayment customers got pushed into prepayment because of bad debt in the first place. So their time and energy go somewhere else, like finding the next job or paying off what they owe.

On the other hand, higher income customers tend to have more flexible assets in the home. 

But what about subsidies? Well, again, it depends. If the payment is bigger for low-income households or paid as cash instead of a tax break they can’t use, more of them install. But you also run the risk of customers churning when the subsidy ends. 

Heat pumps get taken up fairly evenly across income levels. We don’t see the same income level gap that EVs have, for example. 

Life-stage changes the reason. A young renter and an older long-tenure owner both show up as ‘sticky’, but for opposite reasons. The young renter stays because the supply doesn't feel theirs. It’s low engagement and low stakes for them.

The older owner might stay because switching moved online, where they do less of their admin, and because a decade with one supplier comes with its own inertia. 

What isn’t segment-specific

Underneath all four sits the one retention lever: easy to reach, clean billing, no nasty surprises. It won't win the customer on its own as you can't out-serve a cheaper competitor but it's what stops you being the trigger that ejects the inert or the annoyance that pushes the prosumer. It's a floor, with everything segment-specific stacking on top of it.