Storage/Business Continuity
Utility uses open communication
Combined IP and TDM approach yields customer service and productivity improvements.
"Now, if there's another tornado we can easily move contact center staff to remote locations or even let them work from home." - Michael Johnston
During peak call periods,
the Jackson Energy Authority (JEA) taps its
entire available staff to respond to
customer inquiries. When JEA decided to
construct a major new office location two
years ago, it sought to extend its contact
center so that staff at the new location
could be tasked to answer customer calls
when necessary. After one of its contact
centers was disabled during a tornado three
years ago, JEA also decided it had to
upgrade its business-continuity and
disaster-recovery strategy with the
capability to activate contact centers
quickly at remote locations.
As one of the few
multi-utility authorities in the United
States, JEA provides electricity, natural
gas, water, wastewater, propane, cable
Internet and IP telephony services to more
than 100,000 customers in Jackson County and
parts of Madison County, Tenn. Currently,
JEA has approximately 410 employees at seven
office locations, all in the city of
Jackson.
JEA sees exceeding
customer expectations as part of its mission
and has always aimed to answer calls to its
contact center within an average of 20
seconds. During peak call periods, however,
that average sometimes went as high as four
minutes. This was not only potentially
irritating to customers, it also increased
the time needed to get necessary information
to resolve local outages.
"We run predictive
analytics and outage management systems to
help isolate and troubleshoot local
outages," says Michael Johnston, vice
president of information technology at JEA.
"Even if we don't know for sure what's
broken, we can predict pretty accurately
what the problem is if we can get enough
calls from the affected customers. For
example, if we get lots of calls reporting a
power outage in a neighborhood that all
feeds off of a particular transformer, we
can predict fairly accurately that's where
the problem is."
The faster calls are
answered and logged, the faster JEA can
troubleshoot and resolve outages. "We were
looking to shave that peak waiting time from
four minutes to 40 seconds, so we could
analyze real data and get a crew out there
to fix the problem as fast as possible,"
Johnston says. If enough calls are answered
to identify the problem within five minutes,
some outage times could be reduced from
three to six hours down to one hour or less.
To configure a solution,
JEA consulted Black Box, a technical
services firm that designs, builds and
maintains business data and voice
infrastructure systems. JEA had worked with
Black Box to install its existing Siemens
communications systems. After considering a
number of alternatives, JEA and Black Box
decided on a solution consisting of a
Siemens HiPath 4000 and Siemens ProCenter
Enterprise systems.
The HiPath 4000 system is
an IP-convergence platform that works with
both legacy time-division multiplexing
communications infrastructures and more
modern IP-based communications solutions.
With the HiPath 4000 solution, JEA has been
able to equip its new facility and contact
center with new IP phone handsets, while
protecting its existing communications
investment in its main office building until
an upgrade is needed.
Siemens' OpenPath
approach offers organizations several
clearly defined routes for transforming
their communications infrastructure at their
own pace, according to their unique
technology requirements, financial
considerations and business processes. This
was more suited to JEA's needs than a
complete transformation to an all-IP phone
system.
The Siemens HiPath
ProCenter Enterprise system contact center
solution includes multisite networking and
load balancing of calls across many
different locations. It also offers advanced
contact center features, such as e-mail, Web
chat, outbound call management and the
ability to integrate with other business
applications.
The use of the ProCenter
application together with IP phones at the
new JEA location has simplified
connectivity, Johnston says, providing the
desired flexibility to extend the contact
center during peak calling periods and
natural disasters.
"When call volume gets
heavy, employees at the new office can just
pick up their IP phones and log in over the
data network to the main office PBX and
contact center," Johnston says. "If there's
an outage at 7 a.m., for example, since we
also have IP phones installed at the homes
of 50 of our employees, they can log in over
the virtual private network and handle
customer calls from home."
The flexibility of IP
telephony also benefits JEA's
disaster-recovery and business-continuity
capabilities. "If we lost our main contact
center in the old days, it meant massive
rewiring and rerunning of cables to get back
online," Johnston says. "Now, if there's
another tornado we can easily move contact
center staff to remote locations or even let
them work from home, allowing us to get back
up and running in 30 minutes instead of over
an hour."
JEA has plans to invest
in a second HiPath 4000 system at another
location, possibly in another state, to
enhance its disaster-recovery capabilities.
"In the old world, everything was hard
wired," Johnston says. "In this new virtual
world of IP, we can just point our IP phones
to the second switch and restore service in
a matter of minutes."
JEA also plans to add
e-mail, Web chat and automated callback
capabilities to its contact center. "We can
configure automated processes that would
automatically let customers know when an
outage is cleared," Johnston says.
All these measures mean
not only improved customer service, but
protection from regulatory fines as well.
"If the ratio of outage time to customers
reaches a certain level, there are
significant federal regulatory penalties
involved," he explains.
"Now, we can dedicate our
manpower and technical resources to other
critical issues, rather than whether or not
we can get telecommunications up and
running," he adds. "The Siemens solution set
has truly supported us in our mission to
provide exceptional utility services that
create value for both our customers and our
community."
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