Bill Bolmeier

Finding Inspiration - What Can a Power Company Do During a Power Outage to Better Inform Their Customers?

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:37:00 -0700

Recently a power outage happened in my home town. The power company has an online presence with a website.

I've browsed to their website in the past to check the status of an outage but I think there might be an opportunity to provide more timely information in the event of an outage.

The sooner you have some good information about the power outage, the better you can start planing on what you're going to do.

In this case, browsing to the power company's website on my mobile phone (estremely small font, very hard to read) allowed me to click on a link that showed the affected areas and how many people were in those areas.

That's pretty much it for the information that comes from the power company's website.

Social Media to the Rescue: Email, Facebook, Twitter, Texts

Since the power company is already online and you can access your account online, they also have your email address. You could opt-in to be notified by email of status updates during the outage.

They would also have a link to their Facebook page, their Twitter account and the number to call to opt-in for text messages.

The company could provide the least amount of information to get started. Defined by them. However, timed updates via email would be the best.

Although a crew is deployed to find out what is going on, certainly something like the following updates could be sent via email:

Crew deployed to station 20 which handles the areas surrounding <fill in the blank>.
Crew arrived at station 20 and has started troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting typically takes x miniutes based on historical data.
Crew has determined corrective course of action and is estimating power will be back online in approximately x minutes/hours/days, etc.

This would take internal coordination on how something like this would work, but it would make a huge difference and impact on how people prepare for the events in their lives during a power outage.

If a power outage is longer than 3-4 hours and projected to be up to 8, 12, 24 hours, then hourly or every 90 minutes of updates would be incredible news to people. Messages that include what stage or phase they are in out of x phases (or stages).

That's just a start. There are so many things that could be done for free with social media. Providing information by one or two internal social media support persons during a power outage would be a great way to better inform customers of what's happening, what to expect and how they can plan for the coming hours or days.

Photo Credit: Power by Peter Kaminski

Bill Bolmeier

Finding Inspiration - What Can a Power Company Do During a Power Outage to Better Inform Their Customers?

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