Duke Energy’s Planned Outage Portal Streamlines the Service Outage Planning Process
Improving planned outage communications became a top priority for many utilities in recent years as more customers began working from home, making them more sensitive to outages of all kinds. Duke Energy developed its groundbreaking Planned Outage Portal to address dropping customer satisfaction with planned outages. The portal streamlines the process of planning service outages while automating customer messaging as the date of the outage approaches. The portal supports Duke’s operational processes, reduces manual entries from customers and team members across multiple applications, and automates outbound messaging across multiple channels. In this session, learn the benefits of the new portal, the hurdles Duke Energy overcame and the technologies used in implementation, including Amazon Web Services, serverless technologies, and enterprise application programming interfaces. Additionally, the session will detail the change management tools used during the implementation, such as focus groups, process reviews, field visits, training, and communication, to ensure a successful launch. This project won Chartwell’s Gold Best Practices Award in Outage Operations.
Speaker:
Brad Cone, Sr Product Owner, Duke Energy
Brad is Senior Product Owner supporting the Duke Enhanced Customer Solutions – Outage Team with a portfolio that includes: Outage Notifications, Maps, Street and Area Light Repair. Adding to that are a number of internal facing outage applications from Planned Outages, Outage Summaries and PingIt for smart meters. Brad has been with Duke Energy approaching ten years now with an outage and customer focus from day one.
