“Would you bother owning a telephone if you had no intention of answering it?” That’s the question I asked over the weekend to Dominion Power. The social phone was ringing but Dominion wasn’t answering.
Four industrial-sized transformers, that feed power to about 400 condominium units housing roughly 1,000 people, blew out about 12:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Power would not return until 5:00 p.m. three days later. It was a period of time for which Dominion was all but silent, but perhaps a time, when they should have been talking the most.
Dominion’s automated help line sends customers into that dizzying cataclysm of the inhuman variety we’ve all come to detest. All in response to a crisis that is quite essential.
For this building, without power, there is no cooking, no hot water, and no heat. Anyone can make do with canned goods, but the heat is something people cannot do without. Kids and senior citizens live in the building.
About 11 hours after I logged a complaint with Dominion’s automated telephone line, I received an automated call back that power would be restored at 8:00 a.m. the next morning.
This was about halfway through the outage and the message would prove inaccurate. It would be another 24 hours before power would be restored. Even as I type these words, the fix is only temporary. We may yet see another outage before this problem is completely remediated.
When you want to talk to your customers, it’s personal and it’s usually about your invoices. Yet when customers want to talk to you about service interruptions, they get automation and flawed information.
This anecdote goes to show why traditional communications are a poor substitute for social media – real time communication. While social media may seem like a haven for critics in a time of crisis, it’s also where corporate communications can be at its finest.
As the season turns colder, Dominion Power would do well to warm to this idea. If last winter’s accumulation of snowfall is any indication, this is bound to happen again. Moreover, as the year closes, we’re seeing social media adoption by average consumers increase dramatically. It’s an expectation.
Experience tells me Dominion is afraid to engage the public on Twitter. They’d rather keep it hushed up, engagement means attracting attention to the story and more people would know about it.
You can discard those ideas – this is quite public. A better approach would be to join the conversation, use the medium to deliver tips that are useful in a time of crisis communications, and help frame the issue with the air of calming confidence and penchant for customer service.
Yes, it might mean more headcount, but what’s the cost of abstinence? Especially for a company that audaciously raises electricity rates 18 percent as the nation plummets into a recession.
To understand the problem, I did what Dominion could not seem to do: I talked to the crew. I walked down to the site, found the guy that looked like he was in charge and asked some questions: How bad is it? How long before power will be restored?
It was at this moment I learned where Dominion had missed its opportunity: I found hard working Americans, missing their own holiday, working tirelessly to troubleshoot and correct the issue.
The first night these men coordinated the delivery of new transformers – which are about the size of a midsized sedan – installed them and soon got some power back to about half the building.
Many of these men had been awake for 24 or more hours and working in an inhospitable climate. So, at 6 a.m., I bought two giant boxes of coffee from a local coffee shop and a carton of Honey Buns and set them up at their work station. The foreman waved his thanks.
What would I advise Dominion Power to do differently?
- Twitter. Engage! It’s okay if you don’t have the answers. Develop systems now for getting answers. Post updates as to the size, severity and duration of the outage. Will you get beat up? Probably. But that goes with the territory. It’s better than silence.
- Facebook. Facebook is an intimate platform, but you have information your customers want. There is no better place for you to engage customers and with all the benefits of multimedia.
- Photo sharing. Digital photo sharing offers a very easy low-risk way of enabling your entire work force to take photos from work sites and offer them for upload to Flickr. You can post directly by email, or develop a process where workers email a generic corporate site and have a “photo editor” review and approve photos accordingly. Pictures are worth a thousand words; think: the face of an unshaven worker on his 9th cup of coffee braving the cold to restore service.
- Video. Put your people on the front line…on the social media front line. When I talked to your crew, I found them to be sincere, competent and genuinely concerned people working as hard as they could to restore power. What would it take to put a hard hat on a corporate PR person and send them down with a flip cam to do a couple of interviews?
- Blog. Create a dedicated blog for such emergencies and updates. This would become the focus of news outlets covering outage causing winter storms, flash floods and high winds. Sure, not all the coverage would be positive, but you’d keep the negative coverage, posts and comments pointing to the blog and not your home page, while also framing the context by offering a {human} response.
- For the tireless critic. You’ll get these guys from time to time, and one of my most read posts of all time is exactly on strategies for dealing with negative bloggers. In a public social media world you are judged by both how you cultivate your fans and engage your critics.
- Be human. My initial question that opened this post is more rhetorical than literal. Answering the social telephone doesn’t mean you’ll have it right 100 percent of the time.
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Rest assured Dominion’s situation is not unique. Any telephone, internet, cable, or similar utility service provider, with tens of thousands of customers, is in the same situation: vulnerable to nature, headlines and seething customers armed only with an iPhone that can be recharged in a vehicle.
I’m not a fan of “flame” posts, I don’t believe in doing them, as I usually find them obnoxious, self-serving, and I can empathize with a like-minded person surely sitting on the opposite side of a post like this.
However, this event literally struck home. I took a day to cool off before writing this post and I’ve tried to be constructive in my comments, but would welcome your thoughts.
What advice would you give companies like Dominion? What criticism would you have for me?
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Photo: my own
