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Utilities face several challenges as they address an increasing number of outages. About 83% of major U.S. power outages between 2000 and 2021 were driven by weather-related events, according to Climate Central.
As customers grapple with these rising power interruptions, 65% report that they’re frustrated with utilities’ impersonal communications.
However, utilities can now address this communications challenge by taking advantage of AI. Rather than simply reacting to outages as they happen, power providers can embrace intelligent, customized, and proactive messaging that humanizes these crises for their customers.
Utilities that adopt such options make customers happy. Those that have improved their communications have experienced increased customer satisfaction, according to the J.D. Power 2024 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study. Partly due to enhanced communication, business customer satisfaction with electric utilities in 2024 increased 30 points on a 1,000-point scale.
A separate study from J.D. Power points to the pluses of using a suite of communication methods.
The J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Utility Digital Experience Study found that the largest electric, natural gas, and water utilities in the U.S. are not embracing the use of websites and mobile apps for communicating with customers – and they should be.
These are the most effective customer communication channels available to utilities, the study said.
Beyond Traditional Emergency Alerts: The Workflow Revolution
As the J.D. Power report suggests, boosting customer satisfaction requires adding new communication methods. Forward-looking utilities are no longer relying on traditional one-way emergency notifications.
Utilities can now send more detailed messages from multiple channels and customize them for customers in different locations or for those who speak different languages. This allows them to tailor messages to meet various customers’ needs. In addition, two-way communication is becoming more common. Customers are now able to communicate with their power providers about outages and other issues through various channels. They can text, call, email, send messages using chatbots on utility websites, or through utilities’ social media. They can also specify which type of communication they prefer.
AI plays a vital role in this evolution of emergency communication. AI enables more flexible workflows. These are a group of pre-set steps that perform specific tasks such as data manipulation. Workflows serve as the building blocks of communication–and with AI, these building blocks can be used over and over, rearranged, or assembled in various ways to meet different customers’ needs. As building blocks, workflows are part of a larger automated system that provides what’s needed to execute everyday tasks.
The Intelligence Factor: Purpose-built workflows that anticipate customer needs during crises
With AI, workflows can not only be rearranged; they can be built to predict what customers will need during emergencies. In real time, they can adjust and escalate messaging as emergency conditions evolve.
If, for instance, a utility needs to warn people in one location to evacuate because of a hurricane, flooding, or other crisis, the utility can increase the frequency of messaging. Utilities can also geotarget their messaging to specific, smaller portions of their territories.
In addition, intelligent workflows can coordinate customer communication with what’s happening in the field. This might mean that a small group of customers reports an outage, then the utility informs a larger, targeted group in the area affected that their power is out. As soon as more information is available, the utility will explain what’s happening in the field. A tree has fallen on a line, and it will take three hours to restore power, for example.
Hyper-Personalized Emergency Messaging
With intelligent workflows, messaging can be hyper-personalized at scale. Utilities can establish workflows that automatically select the optimal communication channels for each customer, based on their preferences. Power providers can also focus on cultural sensitivity, sending multilingual emergency communications that are more likely to help customers understand what’s happening when they face power interruptions–and how to respond. These messaging options help build customer trust. In their native language, customers learn more quickly and in greater detail about when a storm is coming or whether they need to find an alternative power source for their medical devices. Keeping customers informed in this way can reduce anxiety during service disruptions.
How Customer Responses Inform Emergency Response Priorities
Smart workflows allow two-way communication to take place in real time. As utilities receive input from customers about the timing and location of outages, they can gain critical awareness about the location of outages–and how much an outage affects specific customers–allowing utilities to prioritize their response. Thus, with customer feedback, utilities have a comprehensive situational awareness of what’s happening on the ground.
Intelligent workflows allow utilities to message about both emergency and non-emergency situations. They can automatically respond to real-time triggers such as hurricane warnings, red flag alerts about the potential for wildfires, and demand response programs. In these cases, organizations can send text, email, voice, and app notifications to customers based on their messaging preferences.
As they’re communicating with customers about emergencies, utilities can personalize and segment their messages based on customers’ location and customer profiles. These tailored communications are more relevant to customers and more likely to engage them.
Using Data From Customers to Identify Potential Problems
With the help of AI, utilities can anticipate and respond to customers’ needs. AI can analyze data that includes customers’ consumption history, weather forecasts, prices, and customer interactions. It can also analyze data from sensors and smart meters to predict potential equipment failures and schedule maintenance proactively, which can minimize downtime. This allows power providers to act on critical issues before they become problems.
Responding proactively builds trust in customers. Utilities can also build trust by turning regulatory requirements into opportunities.
Utilities must comply with specific requirements from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and state utility commissions about environmental, customer privacy, worker safety, reliability, and other issues. Intelligent workflows can help by creating opportunities to boost customer satisfaction.
For example, during a crisis, utilities are allowed to circumvent some regulations to contact customers without permission, and intelligent workflows make this happen quickly. This is important because it’s critical to deliver messages on time, especially for medically vulnerable customers. Those who may rely on electricity-powered medical devices learn as soon as possible that they may need to find an alternative way to power the devices, which helps these customers understand they can trust the utility to inform them about service interruptions when they need it most.
In addition, regulations call for utilities to conduct safety inspections of gas lines and electrical equipment periodically. Intelligent workflows can transform these visits into comprehensive home energy consultations. While inspectors are already on-site for safety checks, they can offer customized efficiency recommendations, identify rebate opportunities, and even schedule follow-up services. While customers might view these visits as intrusive, utilities could turn them into a valuable service that customers appreciate.
Customer satisfaction also increases when utilities communicate accurately and quickly during emergencies.
A J.D. Power residential customer satisfaction survey found that utilities that communicate effectively during outages and other emergencies score higher in customer satisfaction metrics than those that don’t communicate as well. When utilities proactively inform customers about outages, infrastructure improvements, utility programs, and services, or about ways to save on utility bills, they experience a positive increase in overall satisfaction.
How Consistent, Reliable communication strengthens community preparedness
Proactive and accurate communication also helps communities prepare for disasters.
During hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, and other natural disasters, utility services are critical to expediting emergency responses. For example, emergency responders need electricity to do their job, and customers may rely on electricity to power their medical devices or for cooling during heatwaves. When high winds and storms damage powerlines and substations, homeowners, businesses, and facilities such as hospitals and water treatment plants need to be informed quickly and accurately.
Intelligent workflows can provide the timely information that allows communities to prepare for and respond to disasters. These workflows also enable customers to report where and when outages occur, helping utilities make decisions that protect communities.
How AI Supports Technology Integration and implementation
As utilities cope with emergencies, they can take advantage of AI-powered workflows that work with numerous technologies. This yields seamless system integration. For example, the workflows can inform weather monitoring tools and systems.
This leads to real-time weather updates about challenges such as lightning and high winds. Utilities can also use advanced data analytics about issues such as customer preferences to escalate communications. They can integrate with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that pull together and analyze information from sensors and devices, allowing for automated control of equipment.
Utility-grade SCADA weather stations are designed for utilities and SCADA operations that rely on DNP3 and/or Modbus protocols, providing weather station measurements in a configurable, turn-key package. They include fast-to-field features that simplify installation and commissioning.
Utilities can use weather monitoring systems to activate alarms for notification and control based on specific weather criteria, including precipitation accumulation, high or low temperatures, and high wind speeds.
AI-powered workflow integration can improve utilities’ response to outages. For example, a single platform that integrates customer relationship management data with work data can give utilities visibility into and enhance efficiency in outage response efforts. By unifying these views onto one platform, utilities can more easily automate storm response, from logistics to communications to resource management.
With smart workflows, utilities can continue to embrace personalized messaging–based on customers’ language, location, and communication preferences, even during emergencies when millions of emergency interactions are needed.
Adopting Best Practices
To make the most of AI-powered messaging and intelligent workflows, utilities can adopt best practices. They should begin with clear objectives and should map out customer journeys – roadmaps of how customers interact with their power providers. These roadmaps can be used to identify automation opportunities.
Customer roadmaps aim to understand a customer’s perspective at various stages of interaction. This process involves understanding customers’ pain points and emotions. Utilities should begin this process by identifying their specific goals–improving satisfaction, retaining customers, or improving outage management, for example.
Organizations can then build profiles of varying customer segments, focusing on demographics, usage patterns, or specific needs. Utilities can create profiles for residential customers, businesses, low-income homeowners, or medically vulnerable customers, for instance.
Next, utilities can identify possible interactions such as phone calls, social media communication, or outage notifications. They can then determine which tools customers use in these interactions, including text, email, phone calls, or chatbots. Organizations should also identify the feelings and motivations underlying these communications. They can use surveys and interviews to pull together information about how customers are feeling and behaving during each type of interaction.
Using this information, utilities can determine which circumstances make customers unhappy. They can then identify opportunities to boost customer satisfaction. They can implement changes based on these maps. Organizations should constantly update the maps as more data becomes available.
During this process, it’s essential to integrate data–such as demographic information about customers–and ensure that workflows can adapt to changing customer needs and new regulations.
Prioritizing Human-Centered Design to Maintain Trust and Create Empathy
Customer roadmaps can help utilities focus on human-centered design, concentrating on the needs of customers and showing empathy for them. This can help develop relationships with customers that build trust and satisfaction.
The customer roadmaps help organizations understand customers’ motivations, preferences, and utility service challenges. In addition, utilities can turn to focus groups and interviews to understand their customers better.
As part of this process, utilities need to identify the challenges they want to address and the customers who are best suited to provide feedback about them. It’s essential to create a straightforward plan.
Human-centered design creates higher levels of customer engagement and helps customers feel more empowered.
Practical Applications of Smart Workflows
When utilities have identified challenges, created customer roadmaps, and focused on human-centered design, they can use these tools in emergency response. For example, with automated alerts from customers’ preferred channels, power providers can keep customers informed, reducing their anxiety during emergencies.
Intelligent workflows also benefit non-emergency communications. They can minimize billing and service notifications, reducing errors and delivering vital information promptly.
For example, utilities depend on automated billing to determine customers' bills. These are based on changing consumption rates. These systems integrate with smart meters and internet-connected devices that monitor usage in real time and base bills on actual consumption. Utilities can detect unusual usage patterns that might alert them to approaching service disruptions.
Smart meters enable automated and accurate meter readings, cutting the need for manual meter reading processes. This reduces the possibility of human errors, estimated bills, and disputes between consumers and utility providers.
Intelligent workflows also optimize workforce efficiency and shorten response times. Intelligent chatbots and other innovative tools allow customers to resolve problems quickly, which frees up staff to address different issues.
Case Study: Crisis Communication in Action
The Mansfield Municipal Electric Department, which serves 10,000 customers in northeast Massachusetts, realized many of the benefits of intelligent workflows for crisis response. The utility was seeking a more responsive and tailored way to message residents about outages. Mansfield Electric was using traditional messaging options that lacked personalization and speed. And the town of Mansfield’s mass notification system wasn’t sophisticated enough to target customers impacted by service disruptions. At the time, the town’s manual outreach programs were plagued by operational inefficiencies, leaving customers either unaware of or unprepared for emergencies.
Such challenges reflect growing pressures on utilities.
“Utilities today face unprecedented pressure to modernize without compromising compliance, cost, or customer trust,” said Scott McClintock, chief revenue officer at Convey. “At Convey, we empower them to do exactly that, delivering proactive, intelligent communications that meet the moment and evolve with customer expectations."
A fast deployment of AI-powered messaging for Mansfield Electric
To address the moment’s challenges, Mansfield Electric chose Convey’s REACH Cloud Preference Center to meet its goals, rolling out the program in March 2024. Deployment time was short – only 45 days. Now, the town’s utility benefits from multichannel messaging – proactive updates via voice, text, and email that will help the utility respond to crises. The utility can now send timely, relevant information to help customers make informed plans during outages.
Town leadership has recorded personalized text-to-speech and voice messages, which create familiarity and trust among customers, especially during power emergencies. In addition, the REACH Cloud dashboard allows the utility to track community engagement.
As a result, Mansfield Electric has experienced improvements in customer satisfaction, reduced call volume, and operational efficiency – all improvements that will help the utility provide more effective emergency communications and response.
The Future of Emergency Communications
The next generation of intelligent workflows takes advantage of AI tools that are capable of interpreting, acting, and adapting in real time, moving from static scripts to dynamic, self-healing processes. This enables predictive maintenance, autonomous grid management, and the integration of new communication channels.
With AI-driven workflows, utilities deliver personalized service 24/7, reduce their support costs, improve employee productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. In the future, these advantages will be expanded to the entire grid, which will include AI-enhanced grid intelligence, enabling autonomous decision-making and improved resiliency.
Utilities that implement advanced emergency communication will gain a competitive edge through more effective and personalized communications and improved public safety and resilience.
As the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Utility Digital Experience Study pointed out, utilities must focus on modern communication strategies such as websites and mobile apps to boost customer satisfaction. Technology that focuses on showing empathy and the human element of emergency response is also essential.
The electric utility landscape will continue to evolve, and utilities must embrace a strategic approach to AI adoption, relying on the many new emergency response tools available as a result of AI.
Utilities that embrace intelligent, automated, and empathetic messaging are likely to thrive in an industry facing increasing climate-change-driven power disruptions.
"We’re no longer just a messaging company. With AI at the core of our strategy, Convey is redefining how regulated industries engage with their customers, seamlessly orchestrating journeys, reducing operational costs, and setting a new standard for intelligent communication," said Maulik Datanwala, CEO of Convey.
For more information about Convey, visit the company’s website.
