The Utility Call Center “Twitter”

With the impact of Twitter in recent events happening in the Middle East, it has once again prompted my thoughts about people and how they use new technology. I’m always amazed at the different ways people come up with to use new technologies that the inventors never envisioned. I truly admire the positive creativity of others as they use these new technologies to improve their lives.

One of the major hurdles facing utilities is explaining the benefits of AMI systems to the general public. The rising pushback from the public and the media about the cost and need for these new AMI systems has shown that utilities have fallen far short on this PR front. Part of the problem is getting utilities to thinking outside of the box. The industry, and its management, tend to be risk adverse. Because they do not promote thinking outside the box, they have trouble leveraging and capitalizing on new technology usages beyond their original vision.

Some utilities may have already begun to implement what I’m going to suggest, and I say, “Good for you for taking the initiative”. For those who have not crossed this threshold of thinking yet, you can consider this a freebie.

Smart meters connected to AMI systems offer outage notification to the utility’s back-end without the end customer’s involvement. This can happen in minutes versus the hours it might take to get calls from the end customers to inform the utility of outages. Surprisingly, most utilities have some type of automated outage response programs at their call centers. These programs collect the outage calls and pass them to outage management systems to process the information and predict where that outage may be on the utility’s distribution system. Smart meters connected to AMI systems can expedite this process much faster. Most utilities have gotten that message and intend to use their AMI systems for that purpose.

The low hanging fruit that I’ve not heard from utilities is how to use this existing and future capability in a manner that gives a direct and identifiable benefit to the end customers. Yes, most utilities say they will post the outage information on their web page for customers to access; but that does not benefit all customers who may be affected by the outage. Many of these customers may not have internet access.

Simply telling end customers that the utility will be aware of outages faster with this new technology does not prove to them that you have made or will make improvements in restoration timeframes. You can put up the SAIDI, CAIDI, SAIFI and MAIFI graphs and charts once a quarter or annually showing improvements, OR you can use the new technology to work real-time for you to win customer approval of your performance.

In today’s world, most end customers have access to at least one cell phone. During power outages, end customers use cell phones to contact the utility because most land line phones have to be plugged in to a power outlet to operate and thus quit working during a power outage. The utility call center does not usually recognize cell phone numbers since most only have the land line number stored in the center’s database. Having to key in answers to numerous identifying questions to just report a power outage does not endear customers to the utility.

There is really no big secret to winning over customers. It can be as simple as being proactive when they have needs you can solve for them. Everyone knows customers have a variety of important information needs during a power outage. So why not be proactive and push information directly to customers in those situations? Most of this capability is available now by simply using the existing call center outage management systems to tap into the “Tweeting” and “Text Messaging” capabilities of cell phones. This can be implemented quickly by most utilities. Leveraging cell phone technology to push messages to affected customers makes much more sense than just putting it up on a web page. Yes, it will take some thought and planning to implement; but it can be done right now by most utilities and can actually cut costs and reduce the amount of incoming calls to the call centers during a power outage. If implemented correctly, it can offer information that is currently not available to customers during an outage.

This idea is within reach for most utilities, and I can think of at least 5 other ways they could use this technology. Do any of the readers have other great, out of the box ideas on how to offer benefits to end customers with AMI systems that you’d like to share?