DNOs must communicate much more effectively over outages

It is no longer enough for DNOs to fix outages as quickly as possible – they must also proactively communicate and focus on impact reduction for customers, says Nicola Eaton Sawford.

By 2020, a customer’s experience of a power outage will be fundamentally different from today. When a power outage occurs, the householder will receive a message within minutes explaining what has happened, giving advice and setting expectations.

Regular updates, additional advice and signposting will follow, enabling customers to plan. There will also be a choice of channels through which customers can choose to access this support. When the outage is over, the loop is closed with a final proactive message. It will be neat, simple and highly satisfying for customers – just as every good customer experience should be.

None of this is revolutionary, but it will involve considerable change for electricity distribution network operator (DNO) business models and modes of thinking.

From a customer experience perspective, the most important thing to understand is the direct link between the impact of an outage on a customer and their level of satisfaction. If you can reduce the impact – by making customers better prepared or improving their ability to cope – you will increase their satisfaction.

The trouble is that traditional responses to outages have focused on rectifying the fault and providing customers with information reactively. Of course, fixing the fault is important, but customers today demand much more, including the ability to cope proactively with the situation while it lasts. In other words, they are looking to DNOs to help lessen the impact.

 By 2020, the organisations at the top of the customer satisfaction league table will have mastered how to do this and will have an array of advice and practical support for customers.

If a customer’s freezer contents are ruined by a long outage, could they order like for like replacements from Tesco to be delivered the very next day?

If an outage occurs, should a customer be able to track the progress of restoration in the same way as they can now track a package being delivered?

Might electricity-dependent business customers of all sizes be proactively offered advice by the DNO to prepare and protect their business in the event of an outage?

These offerings would empower customers and mitigate impact.

At the turn of the millennium, DNOs were using landline telephone number recognition from inbound customer calls to help locate faults and automate information provision.

Advances in communications technology and pricing changes have driven a switch from predominantly landline contact to contact mainly via mobile or other channels across most sectors. Many predict that landlines will become redundant at work, then at home, in the next ten years, replaced by mobile phones, voice over the internet, and non-voice channels.

A choice of channels is now a key customer expectation and primarily customers want both information-only and interactive options. That does not mean DNOs have to create omni-channel environments necessarily, but they will need to provide a selection of channels, supported by a coherent channel strategy.

The most successful organisations will pick their channel offerings carefully, using a deep understanding of customer behaviour to determine which ones they pick and how they are used – they will also need to be flexible about their choices because customer channel preferences change quickly, and this will only become more true in the future.

Success in managing these changes will require staff skilled in adjusting tone and style for different channels. The potential for interaction between channels should also be taken into account and appropriate secondary channels put in place.

 For example, where customers are being encouraged to interact via a website, the must-have secondary support channel is webchat, which is growing in popularity.

One of the fundamental shifts we anticipate for DNOs by 2020 is moving from primarily inbound customer contact during outages to primarily outbound customer contact. Executed well, this could bring significant benefits to both companies and customers. Customers are increasingly demanding effortless service – it is the strongest cross-sector customer trend right now.

Busier lifestyles are driving decreasing tolerance and higher customer expectations. Response times, availability of information, quality of information and consistency are all under increasing pressure and contact centres need to change rapidly to accommodate this. They need to become genuine multi-channel contact centres, where multi-skilled agents operate across a mix of channels. They need to be disseminating information from across the enterprise proactively through outbound one-to-many communications rather than through inbound one-to-one contact.

This model is more effective in managing high volume situations such as storms and system emergencies. However, the skills, technology, processes and management approaches required are profoundly different to what DNOs operate today.

The smart meter rollout should help DNOs step up to the challenge. At last they should be able to identify, at a property-by-property level, where power is on and off – a current weakness that is a constant source of surprise to consumers.

With smart metering, DNOs should be able to pinpoint faults automatically, opening up a raft of enhancements to the power outage customer experience. Customers will set the DNO’s agenda to a degree not seen since deregulation and, among business customers at least, relationships will form.

We are already seeing a proliferation of tools that amplify the customer’s voice, making individual customers increasingly powerful and influential. These platforms will enable customers to be heard immediately by the DNOs and the regulator. They will also obtain influence over other customers.

Customers will more and more judge DNOs on the service they deliver as well as their perceived trustworthiness, transparency, integrity, flexibility and empathy. The smartest organisations will ensure customers are at heart of their boardroom, and that every aspect of their business is designed for the genuine benefit of customers.

If industry responds in the right way, by 2020 the power outage customer experience could be the model all sectors look to as the benchmark for their own crisis customer experiences.