In the state of Alabama, the major public utility power provider, Alabama Power, discovered that the best way to reach out to customers was not through television, which many of its customers could no longer see, but through Twitter. This will probably effect how companies and customers approach emergency communications for the future.
Matt Wilson reports in ragan.com:
"There was a time—not so long ago, in fact—when the only way people in the middle of a power outage could get news was through the radio. But the advent of smartphones has provided an entirely new avenue, one that communicators at Alabama Power put to use late last month as tornadoes ripped through the state.
"Smartphone connectivity was much better than you'd expect," says Ike Pigott, a spokesman for the utility and manager of its Twitter account.
As the storms raged on, and in the days following, as the company rushed to restore power to 412,229 customers, Pigott and his team tweeted away, but with caution.
"We tried to be very careful about not making promises about specific days or specific times of recovery," he says. "In many cases, we didn't know how bad it was until we were right there looking at it."
The response to the Twitter effort was huge. Alabama Power added 1,335 followers looking for information about the storm and the cleanup. The utility's response to the crisis has given it a roadmap for future crisis communications, as well as how it might handle customer service.
Media pipeline
Tornado sirens woke Pigott at about 5:15 a.m. April 27, the day the storms hit. He "self-deployed" to the office.
"It was by design, because I wanted to be there tweeting and give our on-call media representatives a little bit of a breather," he says. "From a media relations perspective, we knew that if it's a big enough event and we can get ahead of the media interest by tweeting out numbers before they ask for it, we could eventually cut down the number of calls."
It did. Media representatives began contacting Alabama Power through Twitter rather than the "very labor-intensive practice" of calling, he says.
Pigott began tweeting hourly outage counts and periodic reminders for people to call an 800 number to report outages and downed power lines, "really simple communication," he says.
Picture power
About a day after the initial hit, Alabama Power officials realized it would take more than that simple communication to reassure customers following the "equivalent of a hurricane blowing through the middle part of the state, which is not used to hurricanes," Pigott says.
"So we started changing the message to expectation management," he says.
A key tactic in that effort? Showing pictures of crews at work. Pigott says he learned that technique through a crisis management course at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
"One of the elements they talk about when you're dealing with a protracted crisis is the importance of visual communication," he says. "We wanted people to see just what neighborhoods we were in."
Soon, customers themselves were helping with that effort. "What we were pleasantly surprised with was the number of people who started taking their own pictures and their own videos and tweeting them at us," Pigott says.
By April 30, Alabama Power was asking customers to tweet their pictures, with the caveat that they do so safely.
Pictures also helped the utility deal with some complaints. For example, when a customer said concrete poles would have held up better in the storm than wooden ones did, Pigott tweeted a few pictures of some concrete poles that sustained just as much damage.
Service test
Prior to the storms, Pigott and Alabama Power's customer service team were several meetings into discussions of how to conduct customer service on Twitter. The tornadoes pushed the company toward doing some testing on the fly, though Pigott notes it wasn't "in-depth customer service," because he didn't have access to customer account information.
Even knowing a customer's location wasn't a big help, he says, because Alabama Power's maps of substations don't correspond to neighborhoods. But Pigott did what he could to make sure people knew the power company was listening.
"The fact that you are talking to people makes everybody look at you a little differently," he says. "The people who are ranting and complaining, the people who have the biggest gripes, are those that are never talked to at all. You can make them feel better about the situation simply by acknowledging that you heard them."
Something that went a long way, Pigott says, was just the use of basic manners—thanking customers and acknowledging their thanks.
"We truly were grateful that they were being patient with us," he says.
Those replies all came from Pigott himself, though members of the social media team did help post outage updates and helped monitor response. Unbeknownst to Pigott, some executives were also keeping an eye on things.
"I think that's where a lot of them really saw Twitter's value," he says.
Alabama Power employees are "still taking our deep breaths" after the storm, Pigott says, but there's plenty of data to go through once they're ready to dive into it and see how effective the Twitter effort was.
One point that was evident from the get-go, though, was that some customers were signing up for Twitter accounts just to get information about the storm. About 15 to 20 percent of the people responding were new to Twitter, Pigott estimates.
"We saw a lot of eggs in the stream," he says, referring to the default avatar assigned to new Twitter users.
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