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iFactor Consulting is proud to announce our second annual iConnect Conference.
iConnect is our annual client conference where we share the latest iFactor product features and development plans as well as sharing best practices and case studies on the products we use worldwide. During iConnect, we also work with you, our customers, to drive the priorities and directions for product development in the next year and update you on options and offers for upgrades, product support, and maintenance.
This event also provides attendees a unique opportunity to network with industry peers, share stories of past success and to look ahead, toward the future of utility communications and customer service. iConnect is also the perfect occasion to meet the iFactor team face-to-face and get to know the people that make iFactor Consulting a company we’re all so proud to be a part of.
iFactor Consulting’s iConnect Conference will take place over two full days, in Atlantic City, May 15th & 16th. Please feel free to have a look at our event agenda and remember to check back often for event updates. If you’d like to register for iConnect, please visit our registration page.
Notifi is one of the key products within iFactor Consulting’s EnergySuite, a comprehensive customer communications platform for utilities. Notifi leverages direct interfaces to utility systems along with customer preference management to enable utilities to deliver proactive communications via each customer’s preferred channel (2-way SMS texting, voice, and email).
Reporting outages, receiving estimated restoration timeframes, energy usage alerts, and checking account balances are some of the current features available with Notifi. iFactor is committed to developing exciting, relevant products and features to advance the business efforts of utility industry by rapidly adopting industry best practices and evolving technologies. Empowering the consumer, through user-friendly mobile and online technology, fuels today’s organizational customer service experience challenges. Notifi 2.1 addresses this challenge and the recent release of Notifi 2.2 extends its versatility with several exciting new features, including:
CUSTOMER PREFERENCE MANAGEMENT WEB PAGE
Notifi 2.2 Preference Management Page integrates directly within the utilities’ secure, self-service pages using an iFrame. The console provides consumers the ability to control and manage their personal subscriptions, including preferences for SMS text, voice, email, and smartphone proactive alerts. Many different devices can be configured for subscriptions on a single account, allowing unlimited flexibility to manage multi-tenant dwellings, commercial accounts, and even single-family homes with their diverse set of mobile devices and energy consumers.
Utility customers have the freedom to subscribe alert choices to match their interests, such as Bill Available, Bill Due, Power Outage, Service Work Order Appointments, Energy Efficiency Tips, or Weather Alerts. The use of proactive communications allows the utility to increase consumer engagement to drive program success, while increasing overall customer satisfaction. Leveraging low-cost mobile technologies to complete customer self-service transactions provides direct cost savings through a reduction in calls into the customer service center for updates or reminders.
SMARTPHONE PUSH ALERT SUPPORT
iFactor Mobile offers Push Alert Notification, a new feature used in conjunction with Notifi 2.2, to push proactive alerts directly to your App on a customer’s mobile device. The Apps provides features to allow customers to manage their alert preferences and also allow the customer to receive an alert and then take an action, such as making a payment, directly in the App. Each notification creates an efficient, timely communication to utility customers with friendly reminders, ranging from bill-and-payment to energy usage and outage communications.
ADMINISTRATION CONSOLE ENHANCEMENTS:
Statistics/Charting Tools and Broadcast Messages
Notifi’s Administration Console has received a significant upgrade with version 2.2, incorporating enhanced Statistics features, new interface for message history, and improved Broadcast Message features. Under the Statistics tab, authorized internal utility employees can now view statistical summaries and corresponding charting tools to capture detailed analysis of outbound and inbound messaging traffic by channel type (SMS text, voice, email). For example, a supervisor may view the number of inbound text messages by category through a keyword, such as REGistration, OUTage reporting, or BALance inquiry.
The Broadcast Messages tab features the utility’s ability to create customized, ad hoc messages to send to groups of customers. Utility employees have the capability of initiating campaign-related messages through specific channels to targeted recipients. For example, an internal employee can choose a campaign (i.e., scheduled outage), select recipient(s) (i.e., customers within specific zip code), configure the message body for each support channel (i.e., email, voice, and/or SMS text), and promptly initiate the broadcast message(s).
Notifi 2.2 also includes additional integration into the overall iFactor’s EnergySuite platform, allowing further gains in sharing interfaces and data between Notifi, Storm Center, StreetLightOutage.com, and the iFactor Mobile products. A new module is available providing standard SmartFlows and web services to implement billing-and-payment activities within Notifi 2.2. This creates increased customer service engagement between utilities and its customers and can be implemented across any CIS system.
Notifi’s robust technology lays the foundation for helping utilities communicate and connect with customers. iFactor Consulting continues to shape innovative solutions and software tools toward creating seamless customer service experiences. As part of a comprehensive EnergySuite platform, Notifi 2.2 continues its pursuit of engaging customers to drive customer service satisfaction through convenient, Internet-connected means.
Early April 2012 generated an intense band of tornados striking across North Texas counties, leaving a significant path of destruction in its wake. Dallas officials initiated tornado warning sirens and activated the emergency operations center of Dallas City Hall. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage resulted.
Thousands of North Texas homes and businesses remained without power after the tornados pummeled the area. The severe weather forced numerous flight cancellations, leaving many aircraft severely damaged by hail at area airports. Since the Texas region sits on the southern rim of “Tornado Alley”, media reports, news flashes, and severe weather updates traveled rapidly across the Internet, television, radio, and mobile communities.
Days before the tornado storms affected Fort Worth-Dallas and left more than 40,000 customers without electricity, Phoenix, AZ-based iFactor Consulting developed and implemented a web-enabled outage map for Oncor, the region’s largest power line service provider. The weather events in Texas illustrate the power, versatility, and reliability of Storm Center by providing reliable outage updates via Oncor’s website, accessible from any computer or Smartphone. iFactor’s outage map allowed Oncor to provide timely, continuous outage communications with its customers while preventing a flood of telephone traffic and related delays to its call center.
iFactor’s innovative Storm Center solution is the leading web and mobile map-based outage communications software used by North America’s largest utilities. Storm Center informed Oncor’s customers via their website or Smartphone of the areas where outages occurred, the number of customers affected, and the estimated restoration times, using high-resolution, online-mapping technology provided by Bing Maps, a division of Microsoft. Storm Center’s interactive, scalable, web-based power-outage mapping product empowers customers to access real-time outage information from its utility-provider.
The Oncor Storm Center site was launched just three days before the storms struck, with new links on the oncor.com site providing the only visibility into the new tool. During the week surrounding this storm, the outage map received more than 28,000 page views, with more than 30% of those views originating from mobile devices. Over 250 cities and towns within Texas, including visits from throughout the United States and globally, visited the Oncor Storm Center site. iFactor’s Storm Center created another dimension to Oncor’s customer service efforts.
This diversity of visits shows that impacted residents, as well as their friends and family around the world, use the outage map to gain immediate understanding of one aspect of this type of natural disaster. The rich, detailed maps with easy-to-read legend information vividly illustrate Storm Center’s ability to deliver information to this varied audience. Users can search by location or zip code to generate specific results of outage areas and estimated restoration times.
Oncor spokeswoman Catherine Cuellar said the utility had upgraded its online weather site, stormcenter.oncor.com, which customers can use to track outages and estimates of power restoration. Cuellar said the site, which can report on areas as small as a zip code, was experiencing heavy traffic as a result of the storms. “Through focus groups and survey feedback, Oncor customers have told us they want more information,” Oncor Chief Customer Officer Brenda Jackson said. “The new map adds transparency about our business and improves the customer experience through up-to-date outage information, including estimated time of restoration when available to help customers plan to safely await restoration.”
“We are very excited for customers to have this new tool in their hands,” Jackson said. “This is only the beginning in a series of initiatives in the works to keep our customers as informed as possible.”
“Oncor’s vision for a modern, interactive, intuitive electric grid is real, tangible and happening now. Our first considerations . . . advance smart grid initiatives to improve service and reliability. That’s where we have focused our attention and energy,” said Bob Shapard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Oncor.
Oncor’s smart grid program is an all-encompassing transformation of electric grid. Oncor has instituted the nation’s largest full-scale deployment by installing nearly one-quarter million advanced meters to its customers. This initiative provides Oncor with valuable power disruption information to inform consumers in a timely manner.
Oncor’s customer education program advances the goals of the Smart Texas project (www.smarttexas.com). By partnering with iFactor, Oncor’s proactive customer-oriented approach leveraged the Storm Center solution to address its customer’s need for outage information and communication. The severity of the Texas tornado storms fueled numerous postings of comments, alerts, and images on various social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Social media and blog postings drew attention to web links featuring Oncor Storm Center’s real-time, interactive map overview and outage communication.
Additionally, Oncor recently enhanced the mobile version of Oncor.com for customers seeking utility information from their Smartphones or tablets. Storm Center supports Android, iPhone, iPod, and iPad platforms. iFactor developed Oncor’s new mobile-friendly design to make it simple and intuitive for customers to access outage maps, report power issues, request service, and call the “Ask Oncor” hotline.
Aligning itself with Oncor’s corporate initiatives of implementing “the latest technology to keep electricity moving at light speed”, iFactor’s Storm Center intends to employ innovative technology to keep utility companies’ map-based outage communication system also progressing at an equally brisk pace.
Related Links
Oncor Corporate Information
Dallas, TX-based Oncor serves a vast majority of Texas’ energy market, comprising more than 117,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines to over 400 cities and 91 counties, servicing over 3.1 million homes and businesses. The nation’s sixth-largest U.S. transmission and distribution company supplies electricity to approximately 7 million consumers, about one-third of Texas’ population.
Oncor Storm Center: http://stormcenter.oncor.com
FirstEnergy Corp. has deployed a new outage map across its utility company service territory, providing access to real-time power outage information to the general public. The solution uses an interactive web map to provide easy access to information on the number of customers impacted in any of the counties occupied by FirstEnergy’s 6 million customers, along with drill-down capabilities to get details about individual towns or ZIP codes.
The FirstEnergy outage maps were built with iFactor Consulting’s Storm Center product, bringing these industry leading outage maps to FirstEnergy’s website. The maps are available for both desktop and smartphone browsers and they include access to information including customer counts, estimated restoration times, and regional alerts directly on the map. The new outage maps provide critical information for FirstEnergy’s utility company customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia and Maryland, and can be accessed from the FirstEnergy website at http://www.firstenergycorp.com/outages
About FirstEnergy
FirstEnergy is a diversified energy company dedicated to safety, reliability and operational excellence. Its 10 electric distribution companies comprise the nation’s largest investor-owned electric system. Its diverse generating fleet features non-emitting nuclear, scrubbed baseload coal, natural gas, and pumped-storage hydro and other renewables, and has a total generating capacity of nearly 23,000 megawatts.