The Client

Wheat Belt Public Power District (PPD) covers approximately 3,600 square miles of the southern portion of Nebraska’s panhandle. Responsible for supplying 2,400 customers with vital energy resources to support midwest farms and families, Wheat Belt PPD places a high priority on communicating with customers.

 

The Challenge

When it comes to serving customers that depend on your organization to provide a life-sustaining resource such as energy, the smallest issue may quickly become a giant problem. Two years ago, Wheat Belt PPD partnered with CallMyList to develop a reliable, strategic solution to communicate important information to its massive customer base. The organization needed a way to quickly inform customers of outages or pending disconnects – a problem that adds devastating costs and hardship for both the customers and the power company. It was also extremely crucial to find a solution that would allow them to improve customer relationships and send personal messages to explain ‘why’ a planned or unplanned outage is occurring. Most importantly, the communication solution had to be easy to use and quick to deliver in order to respond to disastrous circumstances and immediate customer needs.

 

The Strategy

CallMyList and Wheat Belt PPD designed a strategy that would address these challenges and facilitate better communication with the customers they serve. First, a program was put into place to send automated calls notifying customers who may experience service disconnections due to payment difficulties. This gave customers the option to respond to the notification and set up a payment plan to prevent disruption of service. Secondly, CallMyList’s easy-to-use software platform enabled Wheat Belt PPD customer care assistants to record and send personalized messages. These messages immediately inform customers of power outages, explain the reason for the outage, and let customers know when they can expect their power to be up and running again.

 

The Results

CallMyList was able to effectively reduce disconnection rates by 40 percent, saving the families and farms that depend on critical energy resources from hardship. Prior to utilizing CallMyList, Wheat Belt PPD didn’t have a dependable system in place to notify customers of power outages. It could take three or more hours to notify customers of a power outage. Now, with CallMyList, personalized messages can be recorded and sent in 5 minutes or less. As a result, customer satisfaction is at an all-time high. Customers are not only notified of outages and billing problems on time, but Customer Care Associates can effectively communicate why the problem is occurring and when they can expect to have power again.

 

The Feedback

At CallMyList, we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction. Jane Bartels, Customer Care Assistant for Wheat Belt PPD says, “In the past two years, I can’t ever remember having a problem with CallMyList. It’s reliable, easy to use, and it makes our customers happier because they are better informed.”

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For more information about partnering with CallMyList, call us at 1-855-550-3515.

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