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For water and electric utilities, it is critical to communicate with customers about potential leaks, rate changes and outages. Speed and clarity are essential to ensuring water is not wasted and customers know about outages. This boosts customer satisfaction.
Until recently, the water services department for the city of Bryan, Texas, communicated with its customers about these issues by calling or sending field crews to homes and putting door hangers on their doorknobs, said Kala Jeske, a data specialist with the city’s water services department.
With this communication system, the water services department often needed to field phone calls from customers with questions about issues such as outages. In addition, sending field crews door-to-door tied up personnel and resources such as trucks.
But in the spring of 2024, the department transitioned to using TextPower, which can send automated texts or allow users to manually send group texts. The water services department began receiving fewer phone calls from customers. Fewer employees and trucks were dispatched to the field. Customers said they liked the change to texting.
“We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from customers,” said Jeske.
“For outage notifications, typically our field staff went door to door with door tags. Now we can push out alerts to those customers,” said Jeske. Those alerts – which could include notifications about work being done on the water system – reduce the number of calls from customers about irregularities such as bubbles in the water.
Texting is also yielding efficiencies for the city’s electric utility – Bryan Texas Utilities (BTU). BTU has a separate account with TextPower because BTU has customers not served by the water department.
“There are several benefits to texting,” said Meagan Brown, public information officer at BTU. “From the utility perspective, TextPower replaces some manual labor so we can explore other ways to improve the system.” Additionally, in the digital age, customers expect communication about outages to be as immediate as possible. “This makes for happier customers,” she said.
Texting not only saves time and resources, but it can also boost the response rate from customers.
In fact, one of TextPower’s other city customers was using postcards and emails to reach customers and only yielding an 8% response rate. By using text, the response rate jumped to over 50%.
The city of Bryan’s water services department is now learning about how to best take advantage of texting, said Jeske.
To inform customers of water leaks, the city uses TextPower’s Group Tag feature to text groups of customers that have been flagged as having continuous water usage, which can be caused by a leak.
“I manually push out an alert,” Jeske said. “We don’t want to automatically push them out in case the leak has stopped.”
Communicating quickly about leaks – allowing customers and the utility to take swift action – benefits both the utility and the customer by significantly reducing wasted water and saving money.
“We have another customer that saves tens of thousands of gallons of water every month from early leak detection alert programs,” said Mark Nielsen, TextPower’s co-founder & Executive Chairman.
The city of Bryan also uses the TextPower platform to communicate about upcoming water outages or unplanned outages.
In the past, the water department hung door tags on doorknobs to inform customers of these issues, said Jeske. Being informed as early as possible about upcoming outages – caused by contractors interconnecting new water customers nearby, for example – gives customers time to find alternative sources of water such as bottled water. And that improves customer satisfaction.
Along with alerting customers about leaks and outages, a water department’s messaging must also include communication with crews in the field.
The city of Bryan’s water department has equipped its field crews with iPads to help with this effort. With the iPads, crew members can use TextPower to draw a circle around an area experiencing outages and send group texts to the customers living within that circle.
“We added a point for each location and included customer contact information,” said Jeske. “Crews can pull up a map on an iPad and draw a shape around the houses they want to send notifications to. It will build a list of phone numbers and they can push their alerts out in one group.”
This helps ensure that the water department reaches only the right customers with appropriate information, and doesn’t contact unaffected customers.
Just as important, the city’s water department can also send a message informing customers that their water service has been restored. The message might also tell customers that they should flush their lines if there’s sediment in their water. This also reduces the numbers of calls from customers, saving time and resources and improving customer satisfaction.
Currently, the water department is rolling out TextPower slowly so it can gather feedback as it deploys the system. “We went live the first week in June. Long term, we plan to expand our outreach,” said Jeske.
To help customers understand the transition to texting, the water services department deployed a social media campaign to address customers’ initial confusion over receiving texts.
“Once we got over that, people were appreciative,” Jeske said.
Next summer, the water department’s outreach efforts might include sending alerts about wastewater rate setting. The rates are based on water usage in December, January and February. The goal is for customers to understand in advance that conserving water during that time frame will lower their rates.
“We want to do conservation notices when we get into wastewater rate setting so customers are not surprised if rates change,” Jeske said. “Some customers irrigate year-round, and it affects their water rates. They can lower their rates by conserving.”
Water utilities have a number of other ways to take advantage of TextPower. They include account shut-off notifications, payment due reminders, disaster emergencies, boil water alerts, service appointment reminders, pipe corrosion inspection notifications and real-time customer surveys.
Such features allow water utilities to streamline communications, better inform customers – boosting satisfaction – and improve efficiency, all while substantially reducing operating costs.
Like the water utility, the city of Bryan’s electric utility is also using TextPower to get messages to customers quickly, said Brown. The electric utility has a separate TextPower account because BTU has more customers, and some of those customers aren’t served by the water utility. In addition, separating the two accounts allows customers to opt out of texts from either the water utility or BTU. It also allows the two departments to be billed by TextPower separately, so that TextPower’s text fees can be properly allocated to each department.
“We don’t want to mix the two departments,” said Brown. The water department has about 20,000 customers, and BTU has 68,000 customers, one-third of whom are located in rural areas.
Because all of BTU’s meters are smart meters, BTU can automate its TextPower messages. BTU does this by linking the TextPower platform with BTU’s outage management system, allowing the system to communicate directly with TextPower, Brown said. Again, that’s a timesaver for the utility.
The ability to integrate existing software with TextPower is available to all TextPower customers through a comprehensive set of APIs. “TextPower gives utilities a great deal of flexibility to utilize texting and integrate it with in-house or third-party software,” said Mark Nielsen, executive chairman and co-founder of TextPower.
Before BTU began using TextPower to inform customers of outages, the utility would rely on communicating with local media and posting on social media to get the word out.
Now, if a large number of customers are affected by an outage, TextPower will send a message telling the customers that BTU is aware of an outage in the area and instructs them to visit the company website for updates about the outage. Once power has been restored, TextPower notifies customers.
“We use a logic-based algorithm,” Brown said. “If it detects an outage on a device – fuses, breakers, transformers – and 15 people are affected, TextPower will send a text to the people affected.”
Using TextPower, users can report outages by merely sending a one-word text message: “Out.”
Such messaging is critical during storm-related emergencies, which are growing in frequency.
When Hurricane Beryl hit Texas in July, BTU sent out 12,700 text messages. The utility had more than one outage, and some affected only two people, others impacted thousands, said Brown.
Without the ability to text customers, electric utilities often are inundated with calls during outages. Utilities have reported that using texting – rather than other communication modes – reduces the number of calls customers make to the utility by 70% or more, said Nielsen.
Speed is also an advantage. When an outage threat looms, texting helps get the word out as quickly as possible.
When Texas utilities experienced electricity shortages in the winter of 2021 during Winter Storm Uri, many utilities used TextPower to proactively communicate about rolling blackouts and ask customers to reduce their electricity usage, said Nielsen.
“Generally, it was very effective. There was a significant amount of usage by Texas utilities in communicating the need for load curtailment. Customers were very appreciative and more responsive to texts,” he said.
For BTU, outage text messaging generally takes place automatically, with no human interaction. In conjunction with the Outage Management System (OMS), TextPower can be used to communicate outages that are predicted or only verified outages.
This is important to BTU because the outage management system may predict outages on three lines, when an outage may only affect one line. This might result in sending messages to more people than just those who are out of power. By only sending a text after the outage is verified by BTU personnel, it provides more accurate information being delivered to the end customer.
“We have to use our best judgment,” Brown said.
BTU customers also receive texts about planned outages. If, for example, the utility has to replace a transformer that might impact 20 houses, Brown can instruct TextPower to text those homeowners before the event. In the past, BTU sent out crews to hang notices on doorknobs.
In the future, BTU may use TextPower to inform customers about curtailing load when BTU is facing high demand. Texting would help keep customers informed during such important events and help BTU grapple with the challenges of electricity shortages.
“Implementing TextPower has allowed us to better communicate and serve our community, which is our goal,” said Brown.
For more information about TextPower, visit the company’s website.
