Every now and again throughout winter, areas of North America are threatened with a “once in a generation” snowstorm.. Events like this create concern for utility customers who hope that the weather won’t affect their service, especially when it comes to heating their home during periods of extreme cold.
If an outage does occur, these same customers will quickly go looking for answers, filling up your utility’s phone queues, sending messages over chat and writing emails– their only concerns being what happened and when their service will be returned to normal.
To help ease your customers’ concerns, it’s critical to keep them in the loop. Strong customer engagement can help them to feel in control and, more importantly, reduce customer service inquiries.
To achieve this, many utility companies have turned to outage notifications.
Outage notifications are an important way for utility companies to communicate with their customers. They provide timely and relevant information to customers about weather-related power outages, as well as scheduled maintenance and other outage information.
This helps create a better customer experience by ensuring your customers always know what’s happening. It also provides benefits to your utility business.
A few of the benefits of outage notifications include:
1. Improved Customer Service
By providing customers with proactive notifications about outages, you’ll reduce the number of customer service inquiries. This grants more time for staff to handle more important tasks - including helping customers to find solutions, properly communicating with customers, and addressing concerns of customers outside the affected area.
2. Cost Savings
Notifications can help you more effectively manage resources, saving you money in the long run.
3. Builds Trust
Proactive notifications make customers feel like they’re in control, reducing their anxiety and creating a more positive relationship with your utility company. This level of trust will help reduce push back when your utility has to make changes to services or programs.
4. Less Strain on Employees
Proactive notifications help cut back on the strain of addressing customer inquiries due to outages. This can help reduce stress among employees, resulting in improved employee retention.
5. Timely Communication
Outage notifications provide a consistent communication channel with customers, allowing you to keep everyone informed with the same messages in real time.
Outage notifications make a huge difference to your customers and your business. By staying on top of communication and providing customers with relevant, timely updates, you’ll be positioning your utility company for success.
Interested in learning how you can implement effective outage notification into your utility processes? Get in touch with SilverBlaze today. Our team of utility customer experience specialists would love to help.
