Seattle is a city known for its early pioneering efforts in the use of electricity, with it being one of the first municipalities to manufacture lighting systems and have electrified street railways. Seattle City Light, founded in 1910 and proudly lightly the way since, serves approximately 464,000 customers, making the utility the tenth-largest public power system in the United States.
In an effort to improve reliability and strengthen relationships with residential and commercial customers, the utility has a long commitment to exploring new technology and enhancing business processes when possible. In light of that commitment, they’ve partnered with DataCapable to enhance their customer experience further.
The Challenge
How can we improve the modern customer experience? This question is one that the communications team at Seattle City Light asks frequently. Like other utilities, the power provider serves dynamic customers whose preferences, technologies, and relationships with the utility constantly evolve. Enhancing these relationships requires a strong understanding of how customers want to communicate—especially when experiencing power outages and service disruptions. Seattle City Light needed a solution to stay on top of grid events and customer concerns in real-time to strengthen two-way communication and continue to meet customers where they are.
The Partner
DataCapable is a software company dedicated to delivering situational awareness when it matters most. The team at DataCapable develops software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions tailored for the utility industry, emergency management professionals, government agencies, corporations, and more. Products powered by The DataCapable® Platform™ combine patented artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning with human-in-the-loop verification to capture, automate and distribute actionable information in real-time.
The Solution
One of its key products, its Outage & Event Map, helps mitigate community concern and stress by providing utilities, government, smart cities, and emergency management teams with an instant visual communications gateway to inform and remain in communication with constituents.
Empowered with the Esri GeoEnrichment service and ArcGIS Online, DataCapable’s Outage and Event Map enables Seattle City Light to visualize outages in real time while engaging with customers. The platform combs datastreams – including social media – for specific terms and topics related to the utility, such as grid reliability, the brand, smart grid, and renewables integration. When someone communicates intelligence related to any of these topics, staff get real-time alerts so that they can act swiftly and confidently.
The data is presented within an easy-to-navigate visual gateway, showing when and where customers engage with the utility. And it’s not just social data—the platform also displays information ranging from demographics and consumer behavior statistics to natural environment datasets and sensors. The communications team can view and analyze this information and interact with customers via Seattle City Light’s social media channels from the UtiliSocial platform. Outage information filters into the utility’s OMS to help speed response.
The Results
With customer expectations evolving, it’s critical that utilities of all sizes be able to meet them where they are. With DataCapable’s Outage and Event Map, Seattle City Light is in the know and has the tools to respond and address any issues faster.
The utility can now better visualize outage data, customer communications, and imagery from the field—in a single visual gateway and in real time. Additional Weather information helps the utility predict when outages will occur and notify customers in potentially impacted areas via their preferred method of communication.
Analyzing and understanding customer communication generates nontraditional datasets for Seattle City Light to use as a historical baseline. With this valuable information in hand, the utility is able to evaluate real-time events in comparison to previous outages and in combination with asset locations and other visual layers. Staff can create maps, scenes, apps, layers, analytics, and data and share them with existing enterprise datasets. By analyzing all data—both traditional and nontraditional—Seattle City Light better understands customers’ key concerns and drives faster outage response.