I spent several days at CS Week in Tampa, FL at the beginning of this month. This was my first visit there, since historically distribution engineering and operations, which is my area of focus, didn’t have a great deal of involvement with the customer service point of view. Of course, distribution operations does influence the customer’s experience, particularly from minimizing the number and extent of outages, and ensuring that power quality (including voltage level) is appropriate at the customer service entrance.
But there are many other ways that distribution operations and customer service interact. And there are increasing business reasons to insure that the fundamental IT systems, such as the OMS, CIS, BI/Analytics, and web portals are integrated to provide the greatest value:
· The OMS imports basic customer information from the CIS that is needed in outage management, such as customer name, phone numbers, address, account number, service transformer, etc. This has typically been done with file transfers with an incremental update procedure every day or so.
· Often the CIS, usually in combination with an Interactive Voice Response IVR system, is used to take calls, such as outage calls, non-outage calls, and non-customer calls. A two-way interface to the OMS, often a middleware messaging-based interface, in used. The OMS is fed calls information from the CIS and IVR, and the OMS is able to provide information back such as estimated times to restore (ETR), outage cause and extent, and outage status. Non-customer calls can come from passersby, public safety officials, or other non-customers calling to report a problem. Some OMS have a street intersection lookup capability, so if the non-customer can report the closest intersection of the problem, the OMS can find the transformer closest to that street intersection, and the operator can associate the call with the closest transformer.
· The OMS can also generate call-ahead lists for Customer Service Representatives (CSRs). Customers that will be impacted by planned outages can be notified ahead of time about the pending service interruption.
· AMI/MDM systems are improving the customer experience by assisting with outage management. Interfaces with the OMS can provide last-gasp outage notifications, and provide capabilities relative to restoration notifications and meter pinging that can be performed by operators or CSRs . Often a middleware messaging interface is used.
· More often, customers are demanding that more accurate and more frequent ETR’s during outages be provided, to enable them to make decisions about their business or activities during outages (for example, whether they should send employees home if it will be an extended outage, or whether the outage will be short and power back on shortly.) Modern OMS have the capability to automatically generate ETR’s, based on the situation of the outage, so the information can be provided to customers via the IVR or customer service representative. With appropriate interfaces, manual updates to the ETR in the OMS enable the IVR or CIS to provide status updates to customers.
· It is common now for distribution organizations to have internal portals, built on top of a BI platform, that pulls information from different sources such as the OMS, mobile workforce management system (MWM), and CIS. This provides everyone across the organization, including CSR’s, to have the latest information regarding outages, and to be able to drill down and across the information to get further details. This can greatly improve the restoration process. Typically an extract, transform, load (ETL) interface can be used for this purpose.
· Over the last five years or so, more companies have extended the internal web portal capability to external stakeholders. Customers can now use web sites on their computers or mobile devices to connect with the distribution organization and get the latest outage information available. Because of security purposes, and to insure the accuracy of the information that is provided, distribution organizations typically limit the type and amount of information available, but it is still enough to be very useful for customers.
· With the advent of social media over the last several years, customers now have a whole new way to interact with the distribution organization. More distribution organizations are using Twitter and Facebook to not only communicate outage information and restoration status and efforts to their customers, but they are also using those channels to gather outage information from customers. This is an area that is sure to see a lot of development in coming years, in terms of how all of this unstructured data can be used in the outage management process.
