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Knowing your account number or the meter number
affected by the outage will go a long way in helping United crews
restore power as quickly as possible.
During the day, customer service representatives at
each United office handle outage calls person-to-person and manually
input data into our computer system in order to inform the crews about
an outage. However, in an effort to be able to handle a number of calls
with minimal personnel at night and on the weekends, many after-hour’s
calls are managed by an automated service and reports are controlled by United’s outage management software. This automated system works in two
basic steps:
(1) Using a caller
identification feature, our automated outage management software links
the phone number from which the call was placed to a member’s specific
account information. If working properly, the linking process will
immediately bring up the member’s name, home address, account number, a
list of meters on the account, meter numbers and map location of the
potential outage.
(2) If that phone number
is not recognized because the member is calling from another location or
a cell phone, members are instructed to leave a detailed message about
their outage.
By knowing the account number associated with the
meter affected by the outage, members can help United crews report to
the correct outage area faster and fix the problem quicker.
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