ESC Delivery SVP David Greenberg wants you to know just how cutting-edge utility customer care can be

By Kathleen Wolf Davis, Director of Digital Marketing

“I feel like I’ve always been in tech,” David Greenberg, ESC’s SVP of Global Delivery & Operations told me one morning during a long car ride across L.A. “What’s that old saying? It’s in my blood? Exactly. My very first job was as a runner on the trading floor of the NY Mercantile Exchange—an oddly low-tech high-tech job being a pit runner. It’s both the antithesis of tech but also the heart of it. And I’ve been in the technology business ever since.”

“Ever since” certainly covers a diverse range of technology for David. While still a part of the action on the trading floor—back when it still resembled the b-roll from that old Eddie Murphy movie “Trading Places”—David graduated from pit running to running the commodities exchange. He’s studied engineering; he’s a self-proclaimed “pretty decent” developer. And he’s designed utilities markets.

“Ever since that first work at the Exchange, I’ve been tangential to the utility world. It’s home,” he added. “And that combined sense of my utility center and my tech self, well, that’s what led me here to ESC.”

Full disclosure here: David didn’t come seeking us in this situation. We went seeking David. Through a series of interpersonal connections, it became very evident that he was the right man for the delivery job here, and we are delighted he agreed to join us.

And he’s delighted he can continue working on the new and notable of technology for his utility world with a team he loves and the freedom to do—in his words—truly amazing stuff.

“We’re really cutting edge, which is so odd to say but absolutely true, and I don’t think we tout it enough. We’re the first company to put the utility in a self-managed cloud. We’re an aspirational leader in SaaS. We’re moving—actively—from being merely a utility implementor to fully operating the customer side of utilities with platforms and partnerships like ESC PARTNERS CUSTOMER CARE 360 (CC360). CC360 is a real favorite product of mine. It’s the first shared tendency in a utility platform. It’s all really exciting stuff,” he gushed.

And it’s not just exciting for him as a tech head and an engineer, it’s also proven to be exciting stuff for our ESC customers—sometimes good exciting, sometimes bad exciting, but always game changing in all the best ways that change management can be.

David tells the story of traveling to a current customer in the American South to get contracts signed and final details hammered out. During the process, our ESC team had to visit the local city commission, and it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that one commissioner in particular didn’t understand the rather ethereal aspect of cloud technology.

The commissioner talked about how he was building a house during the pandemic and having supply chain problems, and he wanted to know how the supply chain problems he was personally facing would impact his city’s new technology investment.

“It was right there that I realized two things,” David added. “First, we had to leverage both our tech knowledge and our personal empathy to tackle what was going to be a very large change management story here, and, second, once we hit that a-ha moment and everyone in this process saw how easy and logical and simple the cloud makes everything, we would then have to manage expectations about just how fast we can get them fully into the cloud with this project—and additional projects, too.”

And he’s seen similar moments repeat at other customers as the movement to shift into the cloud has gained momentum in both the utilities and public sector spaces, many of which haven’t been through these kinds of tech projects and upgrades for years.

“If a utility or a city hasn’t been through a project like this in a decade, they’re still in the implementation mindset,” David added. “But we’re not about implementation anymore. Today, it’s all about cloud adoption. It’s a real shift in thinking on the technology side that is now being brought to infrastructure like utilities and public works. It can be difficult for them to understand at first, but once it dawns on them how easy it will all be to manage these things moving forward, the excitement is almost palpable.”

Read David’s personal blog “How you can stop worrying (about implementation) & love cloud adoption” right here. And dive deeper into ESC’s change management thinking with this five-step guide.

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