When you’re dealing with a power outage, the last thing you want to do is call your service provider just to find out what’s going on. You’re busy dealing with other urgent questions, like: “Will the food in my fridge go bad?” and “Will it be too cold to stay at my house tonight?” People experiencing outages have enough on their plates, so the more proactive support service providers can offer, the better.
Exelon gets this. When they realized that there was an opportunity to improve BGE customers’ experiences, they decided to do something about it.
That’s where we come in. Fearless and our partner, Deloitte, were brought on to help Exelon with its work improving their customer experience.
We started by auditing existing content and listening to BGE’s users. After looking at the outages section’s content and Google analytics, we identified opportunities for improvement with the navigation and site structure. Building on the research Exelon had already done, we conducted surveys and interviews to learn about the outage and web experience. From this discovery work, we learned that customers wanted proactive communication, transparency, continuous updates, and personalized information.
We helped conceptualize and develop an award winning Outage Tracker. Our custom Outage Tracker takes inspiration from high-quality commercial services, keeping customers informed about when their power goes out and when it will return. It provides accurate, minute-by-minute information on the estimated time of restoration, as well as crew status and outage cause. In recognition of its impact on the customer experience, BGE was awarded Chartwell’s Gold Outage Communications Award for the Outage Tracker’s development and launch.
The Planned Outage Notifications feature we helped develop also won an award. BGE also took home Chartwell’s Bronze Outage Communications Award for its Planned Outage Notifications. This feature allows BGE to notify customers in a variety of digital ways about maintenance outages, which had previously been sent via mail and often arrived too late for customers to actually plan around them. While the earlier version of BGE's Planned Outage Notifications would take days to send and receive, this process now takes just 5–10 minutes on average.