Customer experience reaches new heights with the PowerAssist 24/7 outage call centre

By Alectra Utilities, first published in The Distributor magazine, an Electricity Distributors Association publication.

Today’s consumers can fill their vehicle gas tanks, shop for groceries and pick up prescription medications just as easily at four o’clock in the afternoon as at four o’clock in the morning. Online, search engines have conditioned users to expect immediate results and have their questions answered just by “Googling”.

Electricity customers’ expectations for power outage communications are no different. A parent getting a child ready for school on a weekday morning, the manager of a local manufacturing facility with employees standing idle late at night, and every sports fan watching a game on television, each expects to contact the local distribution company (LDC) if the power is out, find out when its going to be back and get updates. To meet these expectations, many LDCs, including Alectra Utilities, have come to depend on technology to do the heavy lifting of providing outage information.

Online outage maps, telephone systems with interactive voice recognition, auto-tweets, and email and text push notifications have successfully enabled LDCs to communicate power outage restoration information around-the-clock with minimal staff resources.

Business Challenge

But there was something missing. Surveys and focus groups have overwhelmingly indicated that having the option to speak with a real person in real time is a common expectation of customers and stakeholders, despite LDCs’ best efforts to provide them with reporting capabilities and/or power restoration information through technology based solutions. For one of Alectra Utilities’ legacy LDCs, PowerStream, the challenge was to establish a call centre that operated 24 hours a day.

After business hours, on weekends and on statutory holidays the system control room was minimally-staffed, so when the power went out, those system controllers needed to clearly focus on restoring power and not be distracted by incoming telephone calls. The technology was available, people were not.

Util-Assist’s Vision

The vision for this initiative was to establish a 24/7, outsourced and outage-focused, communications solution – scalable to any utility event and cost-effective – that was staffed with knowledgeable, utility-trained agents, each able to triage customer calls and provide well-informed responses. It would have access to the LDC’s systems, such as Advanced Metering Infrastructure to ping meters and check voltage; a Customer Information System to determine if an account was disconnected for safety or non-payment reasons; and, if an outage existed, the ability to upload the details into the Outage Management System to inform system control room staff.

The Solution

In 2014, Util-Assist was already providing call centre services to several LDCs for Conservation and Demand Management programs. We agreed to pilot a proof of concept for PowerStream where callers reporting a power outage or other power related issue who chose to speak with a live agent, were routed to the Util-Assist call centre. Here, customers were seamlessly transferred to PowerAssist agents who had been trained on the utility’s procedures, as well as given access to its customer information and technical systems. To provide the scalability required to transition quickly from minor to major events, additional PowerAssist agents were pulled from other Util-Assist call centre programs when needed.

“On blue sky days, when one or two utilities are experiencing outages, others are not. This enables PowerAssist to optimize its agents’ time,” explains John McClean, Vice President of Centralized Operations Services at Alectra Utilities. “The model works on storm days too because weather travels. As a storm ends in Southern Ontario it moves into Central Ontario. Calls drop off in Southern Ontario and pick up in Central Ontario, so the customer call load is shifted.”

With the concept proved, additional customer focused services for key accounts and social media were introduced. Key account customers were provided with a direct phone line to PowerAssist agents, who could deliver updated outage information any time of the day or night, and provide follow-up. To further enhance outage communications, a senior agent could post outage information and reply to mentions on the company’s social media properties.

Project Results

Since its inception, several other utilities have signed on to receive the service, including the remaining Alectra Utilities legacy LDCs. By the end of March 2017, PowerAssist was covering the entire Alectra Utilities service territory. To ensure that high levels of performance are being achieved and maintained,

Alectra Utilities monitors its technology-based power outage communications systems, PowerAssist services, and incoming call traffic on a monthly basis. Continually confirming the quality of the information stream from the Outage Management System to the Interactive Voice Recognition telephone system ensures that the majority of callers are satisfied with the automated solution and only a small percentage opt to be transferred to a live agent.

Electricity is said to travel at the speed of light, and today, so do customer expectations for information when their power goes out. Alectra Utilities is doing business better and increasing customer satisfaction with PowerAssist. At the same time that a system controller is responding to a “breaker open” condition, around-the-clock PowerAssist agents are interacting with callers and responding to customer tweets.

 

About the Alectra Family of Companies

Alectra’s family of energy companies distributes electricity to nearly one million customers in Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe Area and provides innovative energy solutions to these and thousands more across Ontario. The Alectra family of companies includes Alectra Inc. (Mississauga), Alectra Utilities Corporation (Hamilton) and Alectra Energy Solutions (Vaughan).

 About PowerAssist

PowerAssist currently provides around-the-clock power outage call centre communications services to nine Ontario LDCs with a combined total of 1.2 million customers and continues to diversify by adding more utilities to their client base.

You can  discover more about PowerAssist on  the Util-Assist website.