The Top 10 Chartwell member requests of 2011; and other stuff to look back upon December 28, 2011
Posted by Chartwell Inc. in Utility Industry News.Tags: 2011, billing and payment, call center, Chartwell, Chartwell Blog, Chartwell member requests, Chartwell research, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, customer self service, customer service, electric vehicle, mobile communications, smart grid, utilities, utilities in 2011, utility, utility customer engagement, utility customer service, utility marketing, Web-based customer service
1 comment so far
It has been an interesting year to say the least. 2011 was a year of more positives for Apple and Google and negatives for BlackBerry and Netflix (remember its Qwikster fiasco). It’s been a year marked by the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il, a devastating tsunami and accompanying earthquake, political protests at home and abroad, and Republican presidential hopefuls rising and falling faster than a roller coaster at Six Flags. And in keeping with year’s past, Congress failed once again … and again (You can’t even cut spending when you’re this deep in debt?!), and another NFL team made a run at undefeated glory only to stumble toward the finish line. Maybe the Green Bay Packers will still repeat with another Super Bowl win – 2012 will tell that tale.
Oh, and the financial struggles of recent years continued.
The year is also one that’s been big for the utility industry. It’s been marked by several high-profile merger proposals, continued smart meter protests and the mass market introduction of the plug-in electric vehicle (EV). It will be interesting in the coming year to see (more…)
Forceful 2011 hurricane season packs an unusual punch for Northeastern utilities December 7, 2011
Posted by Chris Brennaman in Uncategorized.Tags: call center, Chartwell, hurricane irene, northeast, outage communications, outage reporting, PPL Electric Utilities, snowstorm, southeast, storm, tornadoes, tropical storm lee, utilities, utility customer service
1 comment so far
With the calendar flipping to December, two things come to mind: the holiday season is now in full swing and hurricane season is officially over. Having lived in the Southeast most of my life, I can appreciate the day the sun comes out after the last hurricane of the year. While this year was tied (with 1887,1995 and 2010) for the third-most active season in history with 19 named storms – only 2005 (28, including 15 hurricanes) and 1933 (21) had more – it remained relatively calm in much of the Southeast with only two storms making landfall in the Gulf of Mexico: (more…)
Customers rise up against banks; Should utilities care? November 16, 2011
Posted by Chartwell Inc. in Utility Industry News.Tags: Chartwell, Chartwell Blog, Chartwell research, customer satisfaction, customer service, EMACS, EMACS - The Customer Experience Conference, utilities, utility, utility customer engagement
add a comment
It was interesting to watch last month as Bank of America (BOA), SunTrust and the other major banking institutions that sought to impose debit card fees had to retreat from their high ground and reverse course after customers finally rose up in revolt.
Despite this consumer victory, these are still tough times for customers. (more…)
Deconstructing disaster: deadly Alabama tornadoes teach AMI outage lessons November 15, 2011
Posted by Russ Henderson in Utility Industry News.Tags: AMI, AMR, cell phones, Chartwell, Chartwell reports, Chartwell research, disasters, distribution meters, outage communications, smart grid, smart meter, tornadoes, transformers, Webinar
1 comment so far
Tragic disasters can provide valuable lessons.
Perhaps few understand this better than the leaders of Alabama Power Company, which faced the devastation of hurricanes Ivan and Katrina several years before tornadoes took more than 250 lives and left 400,000 without power in the state earlier this year.
“We’ve had more customers out – nearly 700,000 didn’t have power after Katrina – but as far as damage goes, this storm was the most damage we’ve had in the history of our company,” Derl Rhoades, AMI network supervisor at Alabama Power, said during a recent Chartwell webinar. Rhoades was one of three utility leaders who shared lessons learned about using AMI to respond to power outages.
During the April tornadoes, Alabama Power lost 7,500 distribution poles and two substations, 400 transmission towers damaged or destroyed and workers replaced nearly 5 million feet of conductor line, Rhoades said.
It took 7,825 total personnel – 5,715 of them provided by other power companies or contractors – seven days to restore power to all of those customers, he said. What did Alabama Power learn about AMI outage response in the process?
- It is important to have redundant communications paths to all of an AMI system’s towers.
“We were fortunate this time. The top 40 feet of one TGB (tower gateway base) got bent over and it kept working,” Rhoades said. Had the tornadoes taken out several of the system’s towers, the AMI system would have been severely compromised and the response effort would have been hindered, he said.
- When possible, all AMI towers should have generator backup power in addition to battery backup.
- Develop portable communications towers. After Katrina in 2005, Alabama Power decided to create a 100-foot tower that could be hauled around on a trailer. The TGB on a trailer, or TOT, was completed in 2008 to respond to hurricanes but became useful in this year’s tornado response. The company has also developed smaller portable towers.
- Develop an alternative to the cellular backhaul in case cell towers are knocked out. Alabama Power is in the process of selecting a satellite phone technology as a backup to the cell backhaul.
“We’ve got to know what’s happening as soon as possible to get the power back on,” Rhoades said.
Distribution wasn’t the only department that used outage data during and after the storm, he said. Customer service wanted the information because they would need to handle the connection and disconnection orders after the storm, and the sales department wanted updates on major customers who had lost power.
Alabama Power’s AMI system proved an invaluable tool for graphically tracking the locations of outages and trends in restoration in real time, he said.
Chartwell will cover issues similar to this topic at our Outage Communications Summit today and tomorrow in San Diego, as well as during future Webinars.
Two Georgia utilities at forefront of digital paperless billing option October 18, 2011
Posted by Chris Brennaman in Uncategorized.Tags: billing and payment, CenterPoint, Chartwell, Cobb EMC, customer communications, customer engagement, digital mailbox, email, GasSouth, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, mail, online energy information, paperless billing, postal service, Southern California Gas Co., utilities, utility customer service, Zumbox
1 comment so far
A few weeks ago, while checking the mail at the community mail center of my apartment complex, I turned to the person next to me and repeated one of the overused clichés of mailbox small talk: “If not for bills, I would not get any mail.” While not completely true – after all I am still one of Netflix’s few DVD-only customers – there is some truth in the statement. However, we still need to receive birthday cards, holiday cards and (most importantly?) our credit cards – thereby securing a need for the postal service for at least the foreseeable future.
But is there really a need to continue receiving bills through the mail? (more…)
Do you live in a barn?! October 6, 2011
Posted by Stacey Bailey in Uncategorized.Tags: cfl, Chartwell, Chartwell research, customer engagement, energy, energy conservation, energy efficien, energy efficiency, energy usage, marketing, Residential Energy Efficiency, school-based programs, utility
1 comment so far
Last week I was sifting through 1500+ responses on one of Chartwell’s recent residential consumer surveys and laughed out loud at a response with which I strongly identified.
The question was “How likely are you to use the following tools to monitor and control your energy use in the future”. We gave respondents choices of website, programmable thermostat, smart phone app, etc. and also gave them an “other” field with a text box to see what they would come up with.
One respondent had written: “a way to get my kid to close the front door.” I can’t even imagine the ROI on that one.
Secret to a smooth-running HAN deployment: Test, test, test October 6, 2011
Posted by Russ Henderson in Utility Industry News.Tags: Chartwell, customer education and outreach, customer expeirence, deployments, EMACS, home area networks, satisfaction, smart grid, technology, utilities, Zigbee
1 comment so far
Leaders of utilities fast off the starting line in their smart grid deployments say just a few bad customer experiences can cause a traffic jam of popular opposition, and one of the keys to ensuring that doesn’t happen is running all of the system’s Home Area Network (HAN) devices through a barrage of tests.
“I’d say the best go-to-market strategy has five parts. First is consumer education and outreach. The other four parts are test, test, test and test,” J.C. Martin, HAN and EV project manager at San Diego Gas & Electric, said during Utilimetrics’ Autovation 2011 conference that I attended in Washington DC last week.
Martin was part of a panel discussion about lessons learned from HAN deployments. Among participants was Kendall Hestilow, HAN program manager with Oncor Electric Delivery. While Oncor is strictly a transmission and distribution company, Hestilow explained, its customers are more than 100 retail electricity distributors in Texas that each are facing HAN issues. (more…)
