News Articles

What does customer service look like in a Small Giants company? No matter your industry, how you serve your customers says a lot about your values and who you are as a company. In a purpose-driven business, customer service is characterized by strong partnerships, transparent dialogue, and shared values.

Small Giants know that when you create great customer relationships, you get great business results. Take ARCOS (Automated Roster Call Out System), a company in Columbus, Ohio that provides emergency resource management software solutions for utilities companies. ARCOS organizes its culture around a set of core values that drive everything they do. Those values allow them to cultivate empowered, passionate employees who are relentless about customer success.

Culture has been a top priority at ARCOS for more than 15 years, and it’s working. Their values-driven approach to customer service has led to year-over-year revenue growth, high employee retention, and 100 percent client renewals.

What are the customer service best practices that set ARCOS apart? Let’s take a look.

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Think about the time it takes to put together a crew for emergency work — supervisors poring through pages of employee lists, making call after call, sometimes over an hour or more.

For a long time, that was simply the cost of doing business for both Eugene (Oregon) Water and the Suffolk County (New York) Water Authority, but they found a way to expedite the procedure. In fact, with one piece of technology, it’s now as simple as the press of a button.

ARCOS Callout and Scheduling Suite made that a reality for Eugene and Suffolk by cataloging all work requirements, such as union worker lists and employee availability, and automated their callout procedure for instantaneous crew assignment.

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I strongly believe no technology will replace the noble profession of being a lineman. To me, technology is here to improve our existing processes, situational awareness and customer satisfaction.

For several years, utilities and contractors have been exploring the use of new technology like drones. For example, utilities have flown drones to inspect transmission lines and shooting video of insulators and cross arms without having to send a worker to climb a tower. But what other technological changes – such as autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots – could improve utility performance in the years ahead? How will these technologies affect resource management? Will new, high-tech tools improve overall utility performance or just add to the complexity of resource management?

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Utility workers restore power as a team. Getting the job done means sharing and managing information, resources, tools and more. Having a laser-beam focus on power restoration at the risk of putting local officials through an “information outage” might’ve been excusable in year’s past. But in today’s world of self-serve information, people at all levels outside a utility expect to know what’s happening in real time and how they can help.

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Hydro One employees worked tirelessly to restore power to approximately 500,000 customers affected by the major storm system that began on April 14. The system moved across Ontario from Windsor to the Quebec border and brought rain, ice accumulation of up to 30 mm, snow and significant wind gusts as strong as 100 km/hr in some areas. The efforts of employees from across the company resulted in a new record for Hydro One, restoring power in four days. This surpassed the previous six day restoration effort from the last, large scale March 2016 ice storm that earned Hydro One recognition from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI).

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When different utility and emergency crews converge to repair damage from severe storms or hurricanes it helps if they speak a common language — even if it is not necessarily plain English:

“The IMT working in the EOC is producing the IAP.”

Ann Steeves, an emergency management consultant, translates for us: “The incident management team working in the emergency operations center is producing the incident action plan for the upcoming operational period.” Read More

For many utilities, scheduling each day’s construction and restoration work means manually organizing and keeping tabs on ever-changing crew schedules and resources.  Managers meticulously update whiteboards dotted with color-coded magnets representing crews and tracks.  Augmenting the whiteboards are often schedules pulled from a PC-based project management tool and a database management product.  Adding to this challenge is the fact that different departments concentrate on restoring outages, while other groups manage day-to-day construction.

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