Who: Fitzgerald Utilities
Industry: Utility Commission
Services: Gas, Propane, Electric, Water & Sewer
Established in 1907, Fitzgerald Utilities supports more than 5,000 customers with electric, water & sewer and more than 2,400 natural and propane gas customers. Their goal is to serve their customers through professionally trained employees providing safe, affordable and reliable electricity, water, sewer, natural and propane services.
The Issue
Fitzgerald Utilities employs night engineers (NE) to provide facility security, propane refill services and answer after-hour service calls and dispatch crews. However, security checks and propane refills pulled the NE away from the phone, preventing customers from reaching Fitzgerald Utilities. Additionally, during major power outages, the call volumes were too high for one person to manage and customers received a fast busy signals when the call volume exceeded the capacity of the phone system.
The Solution
To resolve the issues, Fitzgerald enhanced the telecom infrastructure to provide a more stable connection to the IUC VOIP system. IUC installed a Polycom VOIP phone for the NE. The NE is included in the IUC queue and receives the first ring. If the NE is unavailable to answer, the call defaults to the IUC call center. The customer now has the option of reporting their issue through an automated system or speak to a live agent.
In addition to the above successes, Fitzgerald Utilities’ customers now have the option of reporting service issues through an automated process. During the first 5 months, more than 10% of the service issues have been reported through the automated system. With IUC in place to handle calls, during major events the NE is able to provide significant event updates to crews such as tree limbs on the lines, blown transformers or poles down that have been reported by customers to IUC.
“Since the IUC transition, we have experienced several major outages. It is obvious to Fitzgerald Utilities and our customers that we could not have provided the level of service without the system and support from IUC during these events. During a one-hour period Fitzgerald’s NE and IUC were able to respond to more than 400 calls from customers. Experiencing these events just confirmed to us that we made the right decision in selecting IUC as our service provider.”