Workshop: How to provide an award-winning outage communications experience
By Russ Henderson, Senior Research Manager –
Here’s your chance to learn from a master.
Southern California Edison’s Tomaso Giannelli will lead a limited-seating workshop during Chartwell’s 13th annual Outage Communications Conference coming up June 6-7 in Chicago.
Tomaso Giannelli, Senior Manager, Business Customer Division, Outage Management & Communications Team, Southern California Edison
The workshop is especially intended to help first-time conference attendees understand how their organization can become and remain a leader in outage communication.
Tomaso, himself, was a relative newcomer to outage communications when he attended his first Chartwell outage conference a decade ago.
“If you think you’re the only utility with certain problems or certain questions, the first thing you’re going to find out very quickly is that you’re not alone. You’re going to find out that the Chartwell family, and I don’t use that word lightly, the utilities in this family really work together collaboratively,” Tomaso said.
After joining SCE’s business customer division nine years ago, Tomaso helped to transform his team into what is today one of the most groundbreaking and award-winning outage communications departments in the nation.
SCE took home Chartwell’s 2019 Gold Best Practices in Outage Communications Award after the utility overcame the most difficult year in its 130-year history, improving customer satisfaction despite wildfires that caused a drop in SAIDI and other reliability measures.
In the workshop, Tomaso plans to give newcomers a view of the path to transforming their organization’s customer communication.
“I want to tell you about our journey that Edison went through, starting where we were 10 years ago with low JD Power scores,” Tomaso said. “Our business customers were complaining to our executives seemingly on a daily basis that we were failing them, that they were losing money and they were going to move out of our service territory.
“And I want to tell you how far we have come, today. I’ll explain how we got buy-in from the field, how we acquired funding, how we got buy-in from executives from all over the company. I’ll tell you how we transformed our biggest critics into our biggest advocates and how we have basically eradicated all executive complaints from our business customers.
“I’ll explain how we used the lessons we learned through Chartwell to educate our customers and provide them with information that they may not necessarily want to hear but they need to know. The most important thing I could tell anyone is you need to be open and honest with your customers regardless of the situation, just like we’re going through right now with wildfire mitigation.”
Don’t miss this chance to learn directly from one of the industry’s leading experts.
You can register for the workshop here.
And if you haven’t registered for our 13th annual Outage Communications Conference, you can do so here. If you have questions about the workshop or conference agenda, you can feel free to reach out to me by email.
We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!
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