When the power went out, calling the utility was the only way to find out what was happening, and that meant waiting on hold while trying to deal with bigger questions, like whether the food in the fridge would survive the night. Customer research confirmed it: people wanted proactive updates, not a phone call to be their only source of information.
But BGE's systems were built around that call-in habit. Fixing it meant rethinking not just what information customers got, but how fast, and how it reached them.
— The Fearless design team“Previously, utilities trained their customers to call to report outages or get restoration updates. Using the Outage Tracker and other tools is a bit of customer retraining to direct them to the best sources of information.”
The BGE Outage Tracker gives customers a real-time answer to what they actually want to know during an outage: is my power out, when will it be back, and what caused it.
Customers can see exactly where things stand, from "Outage reported" to "Crew assigned" to "Power restored," with fresh information every two minutes.
Customers planning around a scheduled maintenance outage used to wait days for a mailed notice. Now, Planned Outage Notifications reach them digitally in 5 to 10 minutes, giving people time to actually plan around an outage instead of finding out about it after the fact.
As a crew assesses an outage, the tracker's restoration estimate gets more accurate, and customers see that updated, more reliable time as soon as it's available, instead of being stuck with an early guess long after a better answer exists.
Every outage ends with a chance for customers to share what the experience was like, through a feedback survey built into the tracker itself. That feedback shapes what comes next, so the tracker keeps improving based on what customers actually notice and need, not just what the team assumes.
Chartwell's Gold Outage Communications Award for the Outage Tracker, and Bronze Outage Communications Award for Planned Outage Notifications