Water Outage Floods Utility Call Center
A February 2019 water outage in Dayton, OH triggered a flood of calls to city’s call center, distribution centers, and Emergency Operations Center (EOC). In just 3 days, the utility received almost 9,000 calls – 20 times the number it receives in a typical 7-day period. Overall, the city was forced to handle a whopping 20k phone calls from this single outage.
Why the Water Outage Riled Up Customers
As you might expect, the 3-day water outage was caused by a massive water main break. It was the largest water outage in the city’s history and in a matter of 10 minutes, the system lost over 2.5 million gallons of water.
As soon as the water stopped flowing, employees were completely overwhelmed. The phone calls came early and often. In addition, the city’s social media page received nearly 24k comments about the outage.
The water system serves not only the city of Dayton but a total of 400,000 customers in Montgomery County. The outage and water pressure problems, which started on a Wednesday evening, caused widespread disruption, closed schools and businesses and forced many residents to buy bottled water or to boil tap water before use.
Customers want to be informed, plain and simple. In this day and age of 24/7 news coverage, immediate access to information, and instant gratification, slow or ambiguous information is a sure fire way to upset the masses. Proactive communications and information sharing can help minimize the number of customer calls and increase confidence in the ability of the utility to manage such a large event.
This is a good lesson learned for all utility companies. Satisfaction is largely based upon expectations, and the only way to set the proper expectation is to communicate, communicate, and communicate some more. Utilities dealing with emergency situations must over-communicate with customers, covering all aspects of who, what, when, where and how, in as much pain-staking detail as possible. Failure to do this results in customer dissatisfaction, operational inefficiency, and a diversion of focus away from the critical task at hand – outage restoration.
