Go360 Customer Care Integrated at Burlington Hydro

AGSI's newest application, Go360™ Customer Care, has recently been implemented at Burlington Hydro

Fully integrated within the Go360™ LiveOps Outage Management System (OMS), it provides utilities with a streamlined call taking process combined with real-time interdepartmental communications like never before.

Go360 Customer Care is a web-based application that assists customer care representatives in taking calls from customers reporting loss of power, incidents such as broken poles or downed power lines, or to schedule a power connect / disconnect when customers move. It also provides customer care reps with a real-time view of on-going outages and incidents within the city of Burlington and surrounding areas, useful information that can be communicated back to the customer.

As representatives take a call, they can identify the customer, view account information, and complete account history. As the customer care representative searches a customer who is part of a known outage - they are provided with a message across their screen. The outage can also be seen on various maps in real-time.

A report is created in the system and the OMS calculates the location of the 'fault device', at the same time identifying other customers who are potentially affected downstream. Control room operators confirm the outage within the OMS and the information gets pushed back to the customer care representative.

This makes communication between customer care reps and control room operators more effective by integrating both systems and eliminating the amount of 'paper procedures'.

Customer care representatives can provide better customer support by letting customers know important facts such as the cause of the outage, the time it occurred, and the estimated time of power restoration, to better manage customers' expectations. An automatic customer call back is also set at the time of the initial call.

Outage information gets posted on the public website giving any customer visiting the website a better picture of the location of the outage, the extent of the outage, and an estimated time when power can be restored. Updates about ongoing outages are posted on the website and available to any internet connected device without the need for any special end-user application.

Management reports are generated from this fully integrated system with important information about 'Electrical Network Efficiency', 'Outage Stats' and additional user defined reports for regulatory reporting or adhoc requests.

Burlington Hydro serves approximately 65,000 residential and commercial customers, maintaining 32 substations and almost 1,600 kilometres of distribution lines. The company is wholly owned by the City of Burlington on the north-western shore of Lake Ontario.