The following is a transcript of the Jan. 26, 2026, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA's News Director.
Our guest on this episode is Korey Bush, Assistant General Manager for Customer Service at Florida public power utility Lakeland Electric.
Korey, as I was researching and preparing for this interview, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is your career path at the utility.
So could you give our listeners an overview of that?
Korey Bush
I'm currently in my 23rd year here at Lakeland Electric
I spent my career here working across several customer-facing and operational roles.
I came in day one way back in 2003 as a lineman apprentice. And from there on, I was just inundated with the fascination of the utility industry at every level.
I spent about 10 years in the field working my way up, taking on several tasks, trying to do the best I could for our customers and for our utility.
And over time, I got increasingly involved in leadership responsibilities until that started to expand into our control center. And I progressed into our energy control center here at Lakeland Electric.
That role morphed me into a broader view of the utility industry as a whole and looking at generation and transmission and distribution on a daily basis.
And really got me, again, energized in that new role, was able to progress through a supervisor in that group. And really motivated me to kind of go back to school, start looking at higher education levels to open up other opportunities at Lakeland Electric.
So part of that progress was eventually promoted to manager of system operations, which basically was over our entire control center, our reliability, compliance was a big factor in that.
And back in 2022, we had a longstanding assistant general manager that was over customer service that was retiring. And that was something I felt like was a huge part of our utility that I needed to expand and get out of my comfort zone a little bit. And so I got out of my sandbox, so to speak, and apply for that position and was fortunate enough to be named as the AGM of customer service here at Lakeland Electric.
And since then, it's been quite a journey. My eyes have been completely open to everything that role fulfills and the responsibilities that I've inherited.
But it's been completely rewarding, as rewarding as, you know, working on power lines or, you know, operating the system. It's just another aspect that's a third of our business that is incredibly important, but it's been really, really a good experience in learning and expanding my horizons a little bit.
And what's getting you here at public power and the public power model is being locally owned and seeing direct impact of the decisions we make on our neighbors and our businesses and those that we interact with locally. So that's a pretty quick overview.
Paul Ciampoli
I would imagine that having all these different types of jobs at the utility gives you some advantages in terms of your current role, right? I mean, is that fair to say?
Korey Bush
Yeah, that's a fair assessment for sure.
The experiences I've taken away from operations and from my time in the field, gave me connections, let me know exactly how things worked and a better understanding to maybe explain to some of our top customers or some of those that have been acquired a little bit easier and to also have that gateway to communicate back to some of our internal departments of some of the struggles and how each division ties into each other and the things that we're doing and the impacts that we have on each other as a business unit, whether it's an energy delivery issue, how that carries over into customer service, or if a customer has an issue, how that can carry over into, delivery and production as a whole. It's been very valuable for that.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to bring something in that's a relatively new development in terms of news that we actually covered in our newsletter, The Current.
JD Power recently gave Lakeland Electric high marks in its rankings for residential customer electric service.
So I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about what steps utilities taken to earn these high marks.
Korey Bush
Yeah, we were quite surprised with the JD Power information and the rankings. We're proud of that recognition from JD Power, but what matters the most to me is what those scores represent.
We've made several internal investments from frontline training, clear communications, consistency has been probably one of the biggest touch points for us, a consistent message.
A lot of our customers are okay with the message maybe not being as favorable to them as long as it's consistent. And a lot of customers just want to know what is going on.
So we've got so many paths and avenues that we've added from a customer-facing model that we've been able to provide that consistently. One of the biggest moves we made probably in that area is we created a quality control and training supervisor in our call center.
We had a high turnover in that position. It's not always the most favorable when you're talking about customer interactions. And a lot of our customers were getting different answers and different versions of what our policies and processes actually are. So we've created that position.
And we've seen the dividends starting to be paid in that area. And I think that reflects also in the JD Power score.
Expanding digital tools is also big. We've launched a mobile app about a year ago to ease the opportunities for our customers to make payments…to view our outage map. We push out a ton of information real time to our customers.
And that's a key part of that. It's important that we have to listen to our customers, get their feedback and that we're directly informing them again with the consistent message of our programs, processes, and that's really what's driving the J.D. Power piece. We've seen it in other benchmarks in our in our division as well.
Paul Ciampoli
And with respect to the mobile app, any bumps in the road as you transition for that, or was it fairly smooth?
Korey Bush
There's always bumps in the roads when you're dealing with technology. But you know, a lot of it's expected. It's just another app and so we're trying to find the value piece between it being interactive, except when a customer either has a problem or they're on there to pay their bill.
And a lot of that comes from the push notifications and the messaging that we want to send to them, being preemptive with things that are going on in the utility as a whole.
We just launched actually last week, but it's more of a soft launch, but an interactive light reporting tool that's going to be in addition to that app that you guys may hear more about soon. But we're excited about those things that are making the conveniences that customers usually have with every other application that they have on their phones or their devices, make it benefit to the utility.
And also it brings efficiency to us from process management and work order creation and getting lights fixed for the customers, putting that tool in their hands.
Paul Ciampoli
I want to talk to you about customer academies -- Lakeland Electric provides customers with an opportunity to learn more about the utility’s operations through a customer academy.
And these academies, actually, I've talked with other APPA member utilities that have also set up and are doing customer academies.
So I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about how the Academy provides a useful tool for customers to learn more about Lakeland Electric and the benefits of public power.
Korey Bush
Absolutely. Public power -- we've got a story to tell, and this is just another way to tell that story.
The Academy -- we originally created it to kind of demystify the mystery behind the utility, but also public power, because we show all our cards. We're public, right? So we've got nothing to hide. And so when we send those invites out, the customers that respond and attend, they get a behind-the-scenes look at every aspect of what we do, from the generation aspect to energy delivery to customer service and to our finances.
And everybody walks away with kind of a unique take on things. Some are there more about to learn about everything as a whole. Some folks that attend have a finance background, so they're incredibly intrigued by that piece.
Some are there just to partake in a community event, but each one of them comes away with one, a two-way dialogue with our AGMs and our general manager, which to us is the largest takeaway.
We're surrounded by a lot of IOUs and co-ops that are all doing great things in the industry, but the customers of those utilities don't always direct access to the general managers and the AGMs and the decision makers that are affecting their daily lives. So that's the biggest message we push is that you've got us here, that we attend the same churches as you, we shop at the same grocery stores, our kids attend schools together, we're going to be at the soccer fields and sports fields and pushing that out.
And it's one of the strongest tools we've gotten accustomed to, specifically in the past couple of years.
We can see those attendees actually corresponding with others on our social media, with their knowledge of how things work, and kind of really becoming an ally for us as well. And of course, we like serving our customers and we like interacting with them as well. So it's kind of a win-win for everybody.
Paul Ciampoli
Yeah, you read my mind in terms of follow-up question, which was, my sense from these academies is you can't quantify it, obviously, but you're creating, in effect, ambassadors or communicators from these academies, participants within these academies who can in turn communicate with their neighbors about questions related to the utility's operations.
Korey Bush
Exactly. People don't always know the difference between what we do here at Lakeland and what a value they have in us and what the surrounding utilities are doing.
We kind of get lumped all together and it's that education piece along with the access and it's a very informal setting and we take all the time with them that they want and we answer every single question.
And so, it's about us winning those customers for generations. Some of them have brought their younger elementary and middle school kids in, which is great because they're learning about the industry and planting seeds in them as well.
Paul Ciampoli
So for my last question, I wanted to talk to you about something. I actually covered the Florida Municipal Electric Association, a recent meeting they held, and you were, as you know, a speaker there.
And so this last question derives from something you talked about at that conference, which was a pilot program that Lakeland Electric has implemented to help non-residential customers and managers track and reduce energy use through interactive interval data dashboards.
So I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners a little bit more about this effort.
Korey Bush
This is a springboard into something we've had or an expansion of a process we've had for years. We were on the very beginning of the smart grid way back in 2009 and 2010.
So we've had for our residential customers a ton of data that's been at their fingertips. It's their monthly consumption, their hourly consumption, and in a tool that faces them on our website.
The opportunity came up with us to partner with, at the time, it was Automated Energy, and they've since been purchased by Brilliant.
But the opportunity came to offer that in a little bit more of a managed service to our three-phase and industrial customers, which we immediately jumped on and slowly implemented and introduced it to some of our more higher energy consumers, some of our key accounts, hospitals, warehouses, and partnering with them to help them see their energy data and then make…business decisions.
A lot of them have their own energy teams, they have their own finance teams that can look and make operational decisions that help them -- if it's a shift decision of adding a second or third shift to a production line or -- one of the cool stories we had from one of our participants was they were leaving bay doors open for hours at a time and it was costing them X amount of dollars in energy to keep the area cooled.
And so just by closing them periodically, those are easy business decisions, but they had no idea. And so as a utility, we always want to serve our customers with the best experience. And this was just another way to do that was to put the tools into their hands, help direct them, help train them, help them see the cost and to see the energy that they were consuming and work with them on business decisions.
So at a very, very high level, it's been very popular. We are looking at expanding that currently. And really our next piece of that pilot is going to be curbing all of our government buildings here at the city with their consumption and really trying to pick them off 1 by 1 to be more efficient.
Peak generation and peak load right now is the topic of everybody's news radar and how precious those megawatts are consistently across the industry and any way we can help curb that and save the customer money as well as it's beneficial to both of us.
Paul Ciampoli
Okay, great, Korey. Well, thanks again so much for taking time to speak with us today. And I just want to extend an open invitation for you to return as a guest at some point in the future.
Korey Bush
Absolutely. Anytime you guys need anything, it's always a great partnership with APPA. And, you know, for us to tell our story and to get it out there is valuable for not only for Lakeland Electric but also for public power as a whole.
Paul Ciampoli
Definitely. Well, thanks again, Korey.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, graphic and digital designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
