Benefits of Outage Notification Texting
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I recently stumbled onto a very interesting article that advocates the benefits of outage notification texting. Texting, while ubiquitous on an individual level (about 97% of U.S. residents own a cell phone), is still in its relative infancy in terms of being leveraged by utilities to notify customers of problems. The good news is that all utility leaders understand the value of using texting as a communication channel, and its adoption rate within the industry is rapidly increasing.
How One Utility is Utilizing Outage Notification Texting
One early adopter, North Carolina-based Lexington Utilities, has been utilizing outage notification texting since March 2019. The utility, which has over 37,000 total customers (20,000 electric, 9,300 gas and 8,500 water), uses a service from TextPower to deploy and manage messages. And by all accounts, it’s been a resounding success.
The main benefit of texting technology is that it helps to reduce call volumes, ensuring that phone bandwidth is always available and that customer service reps have time to focus on other duties that are critical to storm response. The utility pondered adding phone lines to accommodate storm-related spikes in call volume, but instead it decided to expand into texting. Seems like a good decision!
How it works is that whenever there is an outage, a text message automatically goes out to impacted customers. TextPower’s technology also enables 2-way communication – for example, customers can text “out” and the information is automatically processed via the outage management system (OMS) so that restoration crews can be rapidly deployed.
The company sent nearly 50,000 texts in 2020, and early results show that the technology has reduced storm-related call volumes by well over 50%. And it’s just a much more efficient way to communicate – unlike a phone call from an unknown number, text messages are rarely ignored, so they are able to reach the intended recipient much more reliably.
It has also contributed to an improvement to the company’s reliability performance – in fact, the American Public Power Association (APPA) awarded the company the RP3 Diamond Level for its high aptitude in reliability, safety, and similar factors.
The bottom line is that any customer communication channel is good, which makes the utilization of outage notification texting a no-brainer.
