Utility Platform

Utility Increases Customer Satisfaction with Proactive Text Outage Alerts

10 June 2020

The eChannels team was tasked by company leadership to identify new methods for customer engagement, particularly in the wake of several major storms hitting its operating region. Well ahead of the industry, The Customer Service team identified proactive outage restoration communications as a significant opportunity to delight their customers and began pursuing text outage communications in partnership with AGENT511.

100K

New outages processed every few minutes by REACH

The utility’s outage reporting runs on AGENT511’s REACH solution, a two-way SMS communications platform. The platform allows electric customers to report outages to the utility via text and Twitter, and to subscribe for proactive alerts via text message, email, voice, and mobile push. The system validates the customer’s account status and acquires the necessary premise and account information to apply messaging templates and process relevant alerts.  Some key factors in the implementation of text outage alerts:

  • Deployed in 2009 with a leading investor-owned utility serving 3.8 million customers
  • Business logic and templates communicated personalized restoration messages
  • Two-way interactive outage reporting and status updates
  • Integrated with outage management system (OMS) and customer information system (CIS) to provide personalized, relevant, timely messages

The application has run consistently for twelve years and has received praise from customer focus groups. Over 85% of customers polled appreciated the outage notification. During heavy storm activity, REACH processes 100,000+ outages every few minutes.