“Next to energy, the most important thing we can provide to customers is information”
Many service companies are struggling on how to communicate outages (be it power failures or network outages or any other service) in a time when consumers expect to get understandable information via at least one channel – such mails, text messages or Twitter.
For example: While Twitter is quick it can never be assured that all customers actually get that information, as the reach of this platform varies. Then, notifications alone are not enough, customers want extended updates and answers to key questions such as how long the outage might last.
The expectation is that driven by data and multiple formats the ability to provide extended information is rising on the agenda’s in many service industries.
One example for such an initiative comes from the US.
Dominion Virginia Power, an energy company from the US launched outage map, in order to “enable customers to quickly report and accurately track power outages and restoration”.
The newly introduced outage map of this particular company includes a number of features. Plus the offering is clearly directed at a large group of users, not just an internal monitoring team.
Below are the main features of this particular outage map, as described in a press release by the company:
- Mobile compatibility for most smartphones and tablets
- Icons to indicate the number and general locations of work requests
- Customized views with street-level or satellite imagery and live weather radar
- faster updates – information refreshes every 15 minutes
- options to bookmark multiple outage locations to follow restoration progress and
- better tracking of a specific outage through an outage reporting system
The company provides a “How to”-Video to let users understand how to use the new resource. The outage map itself can be found at www.dom.com/outages
Energy providers are increasingly adding such outage maps to their offerings. Simply search for „outage map“ (maybe combined with your particular city) to find a range of providers which have already installed such platforms. In-depth tools to both inform and resolve outages are less common in other areas of services.
What we find notable here is one quote from the press release, saying: ““Next to energy, the most important thing we can provide to customers is information”. The goal of the outage map is summarized to provide greater access to the information customers need to help restoure the their power quickly”, combined with information to “help manage their lives and reduce the inconvenience”. For example, it is clearly stated that the outage summary and map information will be updated every 15 minutes, thus providing one way to monitor how long the event might last without checking scarce status updates on social networks.
Dominion Power is a US energy company, serving users in 13 states.
Background: The ORBIT project project aims to contribute technologies for IT networks, in the areas of fault tolerance, fault detection and disasterrecovery. As one step towards that goal we track as many outages of systems as we can, in order to gain more insights into causes, handling and recovery from such business disruptions.



