A sudden outage not only causes you to lose potential customers, but it can also drastically increase your need for utility customer service during outages. You can try to mitigate the potential for such an incident, but sometimes it is beyond your control. Incident manager PagerDuty reports that 88% of executives expect another large-scale outage this year, similar to the one in July 2024, which would drastically increase your service calls.
Furthermore, if you have international customers or those who use a non-English language, this only compounds the problem.
Below, we discuss the best client communication solutions in these circumstances, and how the best team you could employ would be:
- Empathetic
- Bilingual
- Human-first
- Able to maintain trust
Read on to discover how partnering with a company that can provide this, like Centris, can instead help align you with customer service best practices.
Common Outage Missteps Utilities Make
Many companies today adopt a reactive approach to power outage communication. They wait for issues to arise, dealing with them when they do, and do not incorporate risk planning into their utility support strategies. At the same time, it leaves your CRM team scrambling when they suddenly get an influx of contacts.
Similarly, if you do not communicate properly and in a way tailored to the individual issue, you risk alienating those who are looking to you for help during a crisis. People need to know they are being listened to, and if either your public communication or your support simply repeats the company line, nobody will feel as though they can trust you.
When handling service disruptions, you need to respond instantly. If you do not, people will perceive you as uninterested in supporting your customers. This issue also applies to internal updates, as any CRM team without the latest information, or with different information from what you provide in other venues, will only cause confusion. Your staff will then be impacted by a level of overwhelming frustration that may have long-term repercussions and a drop in loyalty.
For example, the electrical utility company JD Power recently discussed how proactive communication can significantly mitigate issues with customer satisfaction. Whereas, generic notifications that only come after an issue, and don’t directly offer a way for customers to take action, can cause them to feel as though they have a total loss of agency.
Finally, there is always a strong likelihood that you will need to help those who speak languages other than English. This issue exists in both your CRM team and in any menus and interfaces that customers must use.
What Good Looks Like
You need to hit the ground running. Proactive communication that reaches customers before they pick up the phone is one of the key elements of high-quality interactions and ensures that:
- Customers feel as though you are being honest with them
- Your customer service team does not have as high a spike in calls
When people do call, however, you must offer clear and empathetic messaging, informing them of what your real expectations are and not simply a “company line.” After all, an AI could do that easily, and research by Energy Central found that, while 78% of customers have used a chatbot when dealing with customer support in the past year, over three-quarters also reported that using it only made them more frustrated than before.
Ensure that your agents also know how to respond to frustrated customers. Communicate to your team the reasoning behind why they are likely calling so that they can offer sympathy, and avoid putting people on hold wherever possible, as that has a significant impact on how comfortable a customer is with an interaction.
Also, ensure that all (or most) frontline staff speak both English and the following most common language. In the USA, this will tend to be Spanish. Doing this will significantly reduce the number of people put on hold due to transfers.
Varies, real-time updates across every channel can inform all your customers of both what you believe to have happened and provide clear expectations of timelines moving forward. Use all channels that you can in such a situation, including:
- SMS
- Social media
- Webpage news
However, ensure that these are all notably different. While you can copy and paste the basic data, contextualize it in each platform’s different style so that it all looks human.
How Centris Helps Utility Providers Improve Communication (Bridge)
We have extensive experience in ensuring that customers understand the care our clients wish to provide. Some of the main ways we do this include:
Nearshore U.S. Locations
When outages occur, we ensure that people are available in your time zone who can scale up and provide key assistance. With channels available between each of our teams, we can avoid communication issues and ensure everyone is up-to-date.
100% Bilingual Agents
We test each of our agents in both English and Spanish during our onboarding process and actively encourage them to continue practicing and improving in both via our internal QA process. We are also careful to make sure that we have strong skills available during every shift. Doing this ensures that each one can communicate clearly with almost every customer.
An Empathetic Extension of Your Brand
We understand that every company is different. As such, we will work with you to create customized greetings and scripts that align with your brand voice. These reinforce the trust your customers have in your customer service.
At the same time, we ensure that our team is trained to handle angry or frustrated callers, regardless of the issue. We can then ensure that our people know how to handle even those who may attempt to escalate the problems they bring to us.
Strengthen Your Utility Customer Service During Outages
As the ongoing risk of technical failure continues to threaten many online services, retaining utility customer service during outages is crucial. Tap into our offering of retention-driven, communication-oriented, and empathetic staff who can offer bilingual support to every one of your customers.
To learn more, book a risk-free call or schedule a visit to our site to vet our processes. We want to earn your trust, just like we can encourage your customers to trust you.
