Best-in-Class Customer Service, Best-in-Class Utility

Building a world-class customer service organization isn’t easy as a utility, especially for a company like Oncor, the largest electric delivery company in Texas. Unlike most utilities, Oncor doesn’t have a direct relationship with its 13 million customers. In fact, most of its customer interactions occur when there’s an outage or potential outage, which means the lean, mean, female-led customer service team works tirelessly across the organization to get ahead of problems and know everything about what could occur so that they can alert and help customers in real time. Leveraging agile practices, technology and cross-functional collaboration, this small team drives innovation with passion, commitment, and resiliency. They dream big plans that would make it easier to serve and leans heavily on their internal technology partners to build it. Data insights provide the big picture before and after a storm, allowing the customer service team to dive deep into lessons learned and be better prepared every time one of Texas’ unpredictable storms pop up, a winter blast hits or 100 days of record-breaking heat plague the service area. Working closely with the communications team, customer service keeps communities updated and on watch with the best information available. With more than 140,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines serving more than 400 communities and 98 counties, that means around the clock planning to prepare for every possible scenario. And while nobody is happy when they lose power, Oncor’s customer service reputation is renowned and frequently called upon to share best practices with other organizations. They’ve learned how to equip their agents with as much and sometimes more information than customers have on hand, knowing of an expected outage before it happens and letting residents know what to expect and how they can stay safe. Behind the scenes, they’ve greatly reduced the steps needed to restore customer power. So if a technician is out to make a repair or installation, they make sure someone is home and that it’s ok to enter a property ahead of time. Thanks to the companywide commitment to continuously improve, the team is small, scalable and industry-leading.