Communicating with your utility customers

  

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As our first (and hopefully last) major storm of the year came through, Hurricane Irene left just as quickly as she came, but left millions without power along the east coast.  With the hurricane season about half way through and the brutal winter months ahead, you and your electric company should be prepared to communicate with your customers when the unexpected happens.

Losing your power can be stressful, frustrating and inconvenient.  When customers lose power, they want to know what is going on, when the power will be restored, and be assured their electric company is doing everything they can to get the power restored as soon as possible. 

4 Best Practices for Proactive Outbound Customer Communications:

1. Ask Caller If They Would Like a Callback - Customer satisfaction studies reflect significant improvement when the power company provides a restoration callback to confirm that power has been restored.  Asking the customer for permission is a courtesy that can allow the customer to state if they would like a callback regardless of the time of day/night.  Additionally, the callback can be used as a tool for the crew to confirm that all power has been restored downstream before rolling the trucks away. As more and more customers rely on their cell phone, TFCC can also help you send text messages instead of phone callbacks.  
2. Power Restoration Callback - Calling customers once their power is restored is a very positive way to touch the customer and improve satisfaction. It catches any stray customer outages while the crew may be nearby.
3. Status Callback with Updated Outage Information - This is a courtesy call that increases customer satisfaction by pushing information to the customer instead of the customer calling back into the call center. 
4. Flag for Special Needs Customers - This is another opportunity to increase customer satisfaction by offering special needs customers a chance to talk with a rep after reporting their outage or to flag their outage ticket so it can be prioritized based on medical needs.
5. Call in Advance - Many utilities take the proactive approach and call their customers in advance of an event.  The utility states that they are aware of the pending storm, that outages are anticipate and that they have crews standing by to immediately begin restoration efforts. This message might also include shelter locations, and locations where fresh drinking water can be found to name a few. Proactive outbound communications lets the customers know that the utility is hard at work in anticipation of the storm.

Read about why customer communications are so important.

Check back to learn some tips on message script design and to see some sample utility notification messages.  In the meantime, you can view our Proactive Outbound Communications video.