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Keynote: Agility in Meeting Customer Expectations

How does a utility incorporate agile approaches to improving outage communications? In an era of rapidly changing customer expectations, incremental changes make a difference while excellence remains the target. Georgia Power is working with a renewed focus on improving the outage customer experience—listening to customer feedback, leveraging collected data and experimenting with new ideas, and new technology. New tools aren’t always the answer and finding innovative ways to leverage the tools you have is a first step. At PowerUp, Georgia Power will share the latest in its journey as the company continues to improve customer outage communications to increase customer satisfaction and meet changing customer expectations.


Speaker: Chris Caldwell, Power Delivery Vice President, Georgia Power Company

 

Getting to YES. Curating a Winning Business Case.

Tasked with improving CSAT, you’d like to introduce innovative customer communications programs to your executive team, but with limited bandwidth, building a compelling business case and implementing those plans seems insurmountable. In this session, Elisa Henry, COO of Message Broadcast, sits down with SCE’s Sandra Labib, who will share her insider tips and strategies for creating a powerful business case and project plan with ease.


Speakers:

Sandra Labib, Senior Advisor, Southern California Edison

Elisa Henry, Chief Operating Officer, Message Broadcast

Anatomy of an Outage Panel Discussion: Leveraging Data for an End-to-End View of the Outage Experience

What if you could have a three-dimensional view of each customer’s outage experience? In this session, learn how leading utilities are bringing together operational and customer data to gain insights on the customer outage experience from beginning to end – including the important touchpoints, pain points, and each long silence that leaves customers figuratively as well as literally in the dark. Learn from those who are doing this work themselves as well as those who are leveraging industry partners.


Panelists:

Jacqueline Robinson, Director of Digital Experience, DTE Energy

Tim Hendren, Principal Customer Journey Consultant, Duke Energy

Laura Storey, Outage Product Owner, Consumers Energy

BGE Makes Outage Communications More Transparent with New Outage Tracker

Given the potential for severe weather, customers understand that power outages are inevitable. However, when BGE found customers were becoming increasingly frustrated with BGE’s lack of transparency around power restoration, the Outage Journey team began developing the BGE Outage Tracker, which translates complex operational information into minute-to-minute updates to reassure customers that the utility is working 24/7 to make necessary repairs as soon as possible. Attend this session to learn how BGE developed and launched a tracker that’s easily accessible through account holder and guest user validation on the web and the mobile app.


Speaker: Matt Fiery – Product Owner, BGE

Communicating in the Age of Extremes

As weather events continue to amplify and sensitivities around maintenance outages increase as the remote-work trend persists, brand and reputation management is becoming more critical for utilities. During this session, Hydro Ottawa will share insights on the following:

  • How utilities can insulate themselves during a crisis.
  • The importance of maintaining the social license to operate as the industry sees a surge of investments to tackle climate change.
  • The importance of keeping your ears to the ground before, during and after a disruption.
  • A renewed commitment to build or strengthen a meaningful brand and value proposition.

Speaker: Dan Séguin, Director, Communications and Public Affairs, Hydro Ottawa

How Interactions and Evergy Proactively Manage Outages with Conversational AI

Contact centers are at the heart of a utility and the front line for customers during outages and their moment of urgent need. And today, it’s a vital business requirement to support your customers effectively to ensure satisfaction, while balancing operational costs and labor challenges. The good news is that these strategic imperatives are no longer mutually exclusive. Utility providers can improve the customer experience by automating transactions like outage notifications through a digital customer journey, while also lowering expenses using the power of Conversational AI.

Join Interactions and leading utility provider, Evergy, to hear how you can improve customer experience by enhancing self-service opportunities.


Speakers:

Steve Hughes, Senior Director, Utilities Practice, Interactions

Lindsay Washburn, Senior Digital Business Analyst, Digital Strategy, Evergy

Sponsor Spotlight: Drive Total Experience with Outage Engagement Automation

Speaker: Jay Malin, Ph.D., Managing Director, AGENT511

Learning from the Past, Facing the Future: Opportunities in Outage Communications

From drones to chatbots to hands-free technology for field technicians, utility leaders face many new opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and gain operational savings by modernizing their companies’ communications channels, technology and processes. In this presentation, Russ Henderson will draw on Chartwell’s latest research to explore major trends and identify strategic opportunities.


Speaker: Russ Henderson – Director of Research and Councils, Chartwell Inc.

Panel Discussion: Optimizing Your Customer Communications During Outage Events

We are living in uncertain times— and it’s not just because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global warming has created an element of unpredictability, making it increasingly difficult to anticipate the next big outage event. Though we don’t have much control over the weather, we do have the technology to be able to communicate with our key stakeholders. Keeping your customers informed during outages can make these challenging times easier. Join KUBRA and a panel of industry experts as they share tips on how to optimize customer communications in emergency situations.


Moderator: Gabrielle Turner, Senior Client Success Manager, KUBRA

Panelists:

John Zumbado, Senior Engineer, Georgia Power Company

Casey Hollins, Managing Director of Communications and Public Relations, Rappahannock Electric Cooperative

Agnes Y. Lugo-Ortiz, Customer Applications Specialist, Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation

SCE Adapts to Evolving Crisis with Resilient Communications

Between unexpected rotating outages, wildfires, an increase in repair and maintenance outages, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 put SCE’s crisis communications to the test and the utility found itself needing quick, significant improvements. With the help of Message Broadcast, the utility closed communications gaps and found ways to better serve its customers. SCE ended the year above its target goals and 2019 performance for outage customer experience net scores. During this session, learn how SCE leveraged existing systems and channels to send customers customized notifications and other vital information.


Speaker: Sandra Labib, Senior Advisor, Southern California Edison

Lighting the Way Home with Duke Energy’s Street and Area Light Repair Tool

In March 2021, Duke Energy introduced an innovative tool that empowered customers and community members with intuitive options to report street and area light outages and issues. Delivering a state-of-the-art experience to end-users meant custom-engineering a tool in-house and adopting technologies Duke Energy had never used before, such as a customer-facing public cloud application. Since launch, more than 300,000 issues have been reported using the tool, and 481,000 email and SMS messages have kept users informed with status updates. Furthermore, Duke Energy has created a foundation for future analytical insights to improve operational efficiencies beyond the scope of what any of its team members had imagined.


Speaker: Brad Cone, Senior Product Owner, Duke Energy

The last two years have provided a steady stream of crises to respond to – from an unprecedented number of storms on the Gulf Coast to worsening wildfires out West to winter storms and rolling blackouts. This session will bring together leaders with some of the most-affected utilities to discuss the strategy, tactics and technologies they have used to prepare for, and respond to, major events both past and to come.


Moderator: Tim Melton, Senior Consultant, Chartwell, Inc.

Panelists:

Boyd Greene, Director, Oncor 

Susan Adam, Manager of eCommerce, Entergy       

Wayne Boone, Principal, Alabama Power Company