Utilities Should Really Show Customers What They Do

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The electricity business is highly technical and customers do not understand what their utility is doing for them. This deserves more attention in plain words, and customer communications should not be limited to storms, grid problems and feel-good messages. Plain communication is especially important since the correlations of customer satisfaction with verifiable objective measures of service delivery (such as SAIDI and SAIFI) are very low! There is, however, very strong relationship between the customers’ overall assessment of reliability and their feelings about how the company manages to minimize the number and length of outages and provides accurate estimates of when power will be restored.[i]

Insight:
There is a strong relationship between customer satisfaction and
feelings about what the utility does to reduce outages and provide repair estimates, but
low correlation with actual measures of reliability.

Obviously, this implies that the utility must show what it does to manage outages.

Florida Power & Light (FPL) is a great example of this approach. FPL turns installing smart new devices to its network into local media events – adding an automated recloser to a line becomes newsworthy! The following 3 news clips illustrate FPL’s strategy:

During hurricane Matthew in September 2016, FPL initiated proactive and frequent communications to keep customers and key stakeholders informed, with unity of messages across all channels:[iii]

  • Multiple robocalls to ~3.4 million customers in advance of the storm.
  • Embedded reporters provided with open access to restoration effort.
  • Multiple press conferences (daily) at the FPL command center, in the field and at county EOC’s leveraged new satellite technology.
  • Use of Twitter, geo-targeted paid social media and Facebook Live highlighted challenges in hardest-hit areas reaching millions of customers.
  • Print, radio, TV and billboard advertising prior to, during and after the storm.
  • Daily email updates to employees.
  • Customer service kiosks in hardest hit areas.
  • Thank you letters to stakeholders after the storm.

Not surprisingly, FPL won the ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award in 2015 and 2016, and the Southeast Region award in 2017 (despite hurricane Irma in September 2017).[iv]

[i]         Assessing Residential Customer Satisfaction for Large Electric Utilities, Lea Kosnik et al., Department of Economics, University of Missouri—St. Louis, May 2014.

[ii]        See https://patch.com/florida/bradenton/fpl-announces-new-storm-hardening-plan-including-major-investments-enhance-electric-system-serving, retrieved 20171230.

[iii]        Grid Hardening & Hurricane Matthew, Ed DeVarona, Senior Director, Emergency Preparedness, Florida Power & Light, https://www.midwestreliability.org/MRODocuments/Hurricane%20Matthew%20Performance%20Presentation%20by%20Ed%20DeVarona%20to%20MRO%20BOD%2003162017.pdf, retrieved 20171230. .

[iv]       See http://www.paconsulting.com/newsroom/releases/we-energies-wins-national-reliabilityone-excellence-award-at-pa-consulting-groups-17th-annual-reliabilityone-awards-ceremony/, retrieved 20171230, for the 2017 awards.