Southeastern Electric Exchange (SEE) Conference In Review

We just returned from the Southeastern Electric Exchange (SEE) conference in Miami.  We've worked with SEE for years and the conference was a great chance to catch up with old friends, and to hear what's on the minds of today's utilities. Here's a quick recap of a few hot topics at the conference:

• Smart Grid / Advanced Metering Infrastructure - This remains on every utility's agenda. The topic in the Customer Service breakout was "what keeps you up at night" and every utility talked about the need for communications internally, externally and to all stakeholders. The need to plan now for all types of utility communications in the future is paramount. Consistent communication messaging was a recurring theme. 
  
  Here at TFCC we're working on several ideas for helping utilities maximize the AMI to collect and distribute information to & from customers. And to define how, when and what to communicate to who in the AMI Life Cycle. Stay tuned for details.

• Call Center Mutual Assistance: We hosted a get-together at the SEE conference to chat about the Mutual Assistance Routing System. MARS enables utilities to automatically redirect high volumes of outage calls to other utilities during an emergency. We'd like to express a very special thank you to Angie Leslie from Tampa Electric. Angie stepped in at the last minute to tell everyone how Pepco used MARS during last February's record setting snow storm, to route phone calls away from their Washington D.C. call center directly to Tampa Electric's call center - in essence creating a virtual call center on the fly.

• Awards: Congratulations to Entergy for winning the Industry Excellence Award in the Customer Service and Billing category for their "Entergy My Account Online" project. The program offers 19 different and fully automated services.