One Text Message Away from Excellence?

Is your utilities one text message away from excellent customer service?  Could something as simple as a text message unlock the door to customer satisfaction and utility efficiency?  Jerry Sullivan, Kansas City Board of Public Utilities’ Chief Information Officer, believes it can.  Texting will “empower employees and customers with timely and actionable information.”  TextPower, is an outage notifications program that allows utilities to communicate with customers via text.    “TextPower is one of the most beneficial things we’ve done,” Sullivan said.  Since implementation, calls to the utility’s call center have reduced by 28 percent.    “In the past, IT outages that occurred in off hours lasted four or five hours on average,” Sullivan said. “Now, the average response time is down to 25 or 30 minutes.” 

Customer text messages have improved customer relations and are helping the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities (BPU) reach its digitalization goals.  Earlier this year, Mckinsey and Company shared the benefits of the digital transition:

• a 25 to 30 percent field productivity improvement from AI-powered scheduling
• up to an 80 percent capital reallocation based on ML insights in asset health
• more than a 30 percent improvement on customer satisfaction in select journeys
• a 2 to 5 percent increase in heat rate or yield for fossil as well as renewable generation assets
• more than a 30 percent improvement in reliability and resiliency outcomes within existing spend levels

Kansas City BPU will now use texting to contact customers and internally.  “We proved out the functionality and value proposition of the software before implementing more broadly,” Sullivan said.  “Our strategy is to not only increase our customer engagement with our electric and water customers, but also the reliability of our grid, our IT applications, and employee communications in general,” Jerry Sullivan.   Confident this method will work, Mark Neilsen, executive chairman and co-founder of TextPower.  said, “98 percent of text messages are opened and 95 percent are read within three minutes.”