Outage Text Messaging
Customer communication is changing and so are we by providing outage messaging wirelessly.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, of a U.S. population of 301 million people, 262 million or 80% are cell phone subscribers. Additionally, at the end of 2008, 17.1% of American households had become wireless-only, having turned off their landlines. And this number continues to increase.
Consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to communicating and doing business on their wireless devices. To help utilities respond to this trend, TFCC developed the functionality to allow them to send outage restoration and status updates via text message directly to their customers’ mobile phones. It is just another way TFCC helps utilities enhance customer service.
Give Your Customer a Choice
With ever-increasing service level expectations, utilities must constantly adapt to customer preferences for on-demand information. This means offering options for how, when, and where your customers receive information and updates.
TFCC has added Outage Text Messaging to our industry-standard High Volume Call Answering (HVCA) service. The benefits are clear:
- Provide greater convenience to customers who prefer electronic communication
- Utilize an electronic communication that is available even if the power is out, and is usually successful even when cell networks are down
- Leverage current HVCA® system and existing interfaces with CIS, OMS, etc.
- No short code required by participating utility
- Little to no development or IT resources required from utility
