In the energy and utilities sector, customers expect accurate and timely outage updates. Manual communication processes and fragmented systems often leave service teams without visibility into real-time conditions, leading to delays in restoring service and frustration for customers. To address these challenges, the company turned to Decisions to unify outage communications, automate monitoring, and simplify billing-related workflows.
Challenge
Before Decisions, the company faced:
- Outage notifications sent through manual or siloed systems.
- Limited visibility into current vs. past-due customer accounts during outages.
- Difficulty linking customer text reports with outage creation in the OMS.
- Heavy reliance on staff to compile outage data into reports and dashboards.
These inefficiencies slowed response times, created billing errors, and reduced customer satisfaction.
Solution
The company deployed Decisions to:
- Power an outage texting program integrated with its Outage Management System (OMS) and Twilio.
- Automatically capture incoming customer text messages to trigger or confirm outage creation.
- Provide real-time dashboards displaying active outages, affected areas, and account status (active vs. past due).
- Centralize data monitoring and reduce manual intervention in billing workflows.
By leveraging rules-driven automation and integrated communication workflows, the company achieved end-to-end outage visibility and responsiveness.
Differentiators
Decisions was chosen because it:
- Rules Differentiators: Allowed business teams to manage outage logic and escalation rules without coding, ensuring flexible and compliant response plans.
- Flow Engine Differentiators: Enabled no-code workflows to capture text messages, create outages, and route updates in real time.
- Integrations: Connected directly with Twilio and the OMS via REST endpoints, ensuring seamless communication without costly middleware.
- Decisions iPaaS: Orchestrated outage notifications, account checks, and OMS updates in a single system-agnostic workflow.
- Platform-Level Attributes: Supported hybrid deployments and direct database connections, giving the company control over sensitive customer data.