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Five years ago, Imperial Irrigation District (IID) relied primarily on social media to communicate outage information—without a way to reach customers directly.
That meant that IID -- which serves California’s arid Imperial and Coachella valleys, along with parts of Riverside and San Diego counties -- couldn’t inform customers individually about power outages. The utility hoped that customers would see the social media posts.
All that changed in 2021 when IID tapped Arcos TextPower, implementing the messaging system in two phases, said Nadir Bahar, information technology systems analyst at IID.
With Arcos TextPower, utilities can use the platform’s robust API or its secure, web-based application to manage text alerts. It allows users to send, monitor, and automate messages, such as outage notifications, billing reminders, and emergency alerts, through a login portal.
“The outage communications made a huge difference. We could communicate with customers more efficiently and in a more fine-grained fashion,” Bahar said. “That really helped us out a lot. And with outages, it's very critical that customers know the status of the restoration effort.”
Customers said that receiving the outage notification texts was a pleasant surprise, he added.
They weren't used to receiving these notifications via text, and when they first started receiving them, communicated that they were happy to learn quickly about outages, Bahar said.
For IID, TextPower was yet another program that focused on the common good, which was part of the utility’s mission when it was first formed.
“We've got a rich history of serving the valley. We're community first,” Bahar said.
IID was founded in 1911, when Imperial Valley citizens voted for public ownership of water to control their own destiny.
“The vote to put water, and the future of the valley it would secure, into the hands of the people rather than under private control, was a crucial turning point in the valley’s history,” according to IID’s website. The move protected the valley and allowed it to grow and prosper.
Utilizing Arcos TextPower was a logical step for the forward-looking utility, which is the nation's largest irrigation district with more than 3,000 miles of canals and drains.
In the first phase, IID launched the Arcos TextPower program as a targeted, one-way outage notification system, enabling the utility to proactively contact only affected customers.
“With the TextPower solution, we were able to tailor to certain customers, and we were able to give them an estimated outage restoration time by region,” Bahar said. “If their neighborhood was somewhere in the chain to be restored, we would identify that, and we could send more finely tuned messages to different neighborhoods.”
Dee Glander, Implementation Manager at Arcos, noted that utilities can use Arcos TextPower to communicate about a range of issues, including billing notices, disconnect notices, and payment reminders. That can yield important benefits to utilities. One example is text reminders about billing.
“Arcos TextPower users send texts to people about their promise to pay and, as a result, the number of broken payment arrangements decreases,” she said. “Customers can also use texting to let residents know about planned maintenance or planned outages, and advise customers of right-of-way work and external contractors working in their neighborhood on behalf of the utility,” Glander added.
Texting is effective because 97% to 98% of texts are read within three minutes, Glander added.
Arcos’ communication solution has over 220 utility customers worldwide that use it for mission-critical and other applications, including immediate communication with customers and staff and high-security user authentication.
While one-way texting improved IID’s operations, two-way texting took communications to a new level. That was the focus of the second phase of the Arcos TextPower rollout. IID opted to leverage two-way texting in lockstep with a major IVR platform upgrade for its call center. With the IVR system, when customers call, or their calls are placed in a queue, IID agents can see the queue and prioritize their response to different requests.
Customers can send texts to learn about outages and possible restoration times. The texts appear in the call center agents’ desktop application as messages. Call center agents can respond to individual customers’ texts, and back-and-forth conversations between a single customer and an agent are possible.
“Two-way texting has been very powerful and very helpful for us,” Bahar said. It allowed the utility to expand texting communication to other areas of the business, including bill pay and water projects.
A customer might text about an interruption in their electric service or any other subject, and IID agents will forward such texts to the appropriate departments.
For example, a customer’s text might result in a work order being generated for a lineman to check the conditions of the power circuit.
If customers text about having trouble with their meters that might result in a visit from a field service representative.
A customer might have a question about an energy assistance program, and that inquiry might be routed to the energy assistance program department.
IID has integrated Arcos TextPower with its SAP system, an enterprise resource planning system the utility uses for accounting, materials planning, and enterprise asset management, among other functions, Bahar said.
Utilizing the SAP Process Orchestration middleware platform, IID has enabled enterprise-wide communications with the TextPower REST API and with the TextPower webhooks event engine to achieve dynamic real-time two-way communications.
If a customer sends a text message to IID’s phone number, that message goes to the Arcos TextPower server, and from there, Arcos TextPower forwards the message to IID’s enterprise IVR system, he explained. “From there, our call center agents are able to see the incoming communications via their contact center desktop clients and can continue the engagement with the customer as needed”.
IID can input customer phone numbers directly into its SAP system to target specific groups with notifications. SAP then aggregates those numbers and calls the Arcos TextPower API to initiate messaging.
“Essentially, SAP tells TextPower, ‘Send this message to these phone numbers,’” Bahar explained. “Arcos TextPower acts as the conduit that delivers those messages to customers.”
For example, as field crews gather updated information about estimated restoration times during an outage, they relay those details back to office staff. The office team then uses SAP to send timely, targeted text updates to affected customers. A typical message might read, “Based on our current restoration efforts, your service is expected to be restored within the next hour,” Bahar said.
Another advantage of the Arcos TextPower integration setup is that it allows for the IVR system to push full communications transcripts directly to the backend system. If a customer has a back-and-forth chat with an IID agent, the agent will mark that conversation as complete when it’s over. The full transcript will be documented in the utility’s SAP system.
If a customer calls to ask whether IID has followed up on a request, IID agents can open that customer’s account, review the communications log, and check the request before responding.
Arcos TextPower has already provided many benefits to IID. In the future, the utility hopes to implement text-to-pay with the Arcos TextPower system. Customers are texted a link to pay.
“We have their phone number on file. If they pay via text, we see that there's a due bill, so we would authorize the payment,” Bahar said.
Another plan is to implement Arcos TextPower on the utility's water side, where it is not yet in use.
For example, if farmers have a large field and many crops, they may need irrigation water at a specific time. Right now, they call three or four days in advance and place a water order.
In the future, the hope is they will text those requests, and the utility will be able to respond more quickly, opening a section of the canal to release water into the customer’s fields.
In addition, IID hopes to use texting to communicate with field staff on day-to-day issues that arise.
A staff member might be on a site slated for disconnection and want to know whether the customer is a critical care customer who shouldn’t be disconnected. With texting, the field representative could quickly contact the office to resolve the issue.
“If we have a way to leverage texting to accelerate those communications, it would make everything more streamlined,” Bahar said.
Overall, Arcos TextPower gives the utility a big-picture view of what’s happening in its system in real time.
“It allows us to get a better pulse of the community at any given moment in time because we can send them messages, and on the flip side, they can send us messages,” Bahar said.
For additional details about Arcos communication solutions, go to the company’s website.
To learn more about Imperial Irrigation District, visit their website.
