Grace under pressure

By Hamish Barwick | Tuesday, March 09 2010

Northpower taps SaaS to manage customer calls during outages.

Northpower is a community owned lines company with 52,000 customers in the Whangarei and Kaipara regions, north of Auckland.

When storms hit, the call centre staff was easily overwhelmed by demands for information around electricity supply. Struggling to cope with customer calls during such emergencies led Northpower down the software as a service path.

Teaming up with TelstraClear and TVD (Telephony, Video, Data Ltd), Northpower deployed a web based application called Avalanche Lite. Avalanche is the name given to events that cause large numbers of calls. TVD customised the product for Northpower while TelstraClear provided links into it.

Darren Mason, fibre and marketing manager for Northpower, says under the old system, the company had a “basic number of lines” coming into a control system.

“We could only handle a limited number of calls,” says Mason. “The Avalanche Lite system enables us to handle a multitude of calls coming to the exchange. It has a ‘gooey’ interface that allows us to answer questions on the network before it comes into the building.”

During a storm, Northpower can now handle 255 simultaneous calls at the exchange end with pre-recorded messages letting people know of outages. “We’re providing information out to the market in a larger capacity and qualifying more of those incoming calls.,” says Mason. “It’s a good way of getting messages out to customers around what’s happening with the network, rather than the customer having an engaged signal.”

Northpower has used Avalanche Lite for six months, during which time there were a couple of storms. “This allows us to customise it a lot better and put restoration times in. We have a large number of customers ringing up because they have no power, so it’s used for those situations.”

The company is also migrating to a VoIP system on Telstraclear, which should be complete by the first quarter of this year. “We’re sorting out the phone side of the system rather than an outage management system. We’re doing a stepped approach and trying to do the customer facing side first,” he says.

TelstraClear consulting and solutions general manager Simon Baxter says the Avalanche calling platform had to be adapted for Northpower. “Although we worked with TVD in the past, we had to integrate our Nortel switch with the Avalanche Lite platform.”

Other than just recording single messages, the system allows Northpower to join up a number of messages. “If they have a standard greeting that they want to have before or after the update, they can take segments of messages and join them together. You don’t need to worry about getting messaging out of sync.”