2022 – An Operations Year in Review

Another year flew by and it is time to pause and reflect on what we accomplished. Everyone at Utility Safety Partners was working at a furious pace, so we must have done something worth noting!

The first quarter was our usual ramp-up to the season. This year we put together a task force of management and staff to decide how best to focus our Performance Management process on the elements of agents’ jobs that have the most impact on our service. Old-school contact centre metrics are focused mostly on speed and processing more and more calls during a shift. However, we find ourselves in a new era, where the world is moving online, and we are seeing fewer phone calls made to place locate requests. It was time to slow things down and concentrate on providing a service that enhances safety. Speed and safety don’t usually go hand-in-hand.

The new Performance Management program rolled out in the Spring, and our agents adapted quickly to the direction we pointed them in. Our performance metrics are weighted heavily on accurate, safe tickets and customer service. Our agents are here to support many services (not just locate requests anymore!) We are taking the time to educate callers more on the process, to encourage safe digging practices and to provide a damage prevention resource to all stakeholders. The changes took root this season, and we feel pretty good about our new approach. I think our stakeholders will too.

Summer is packed full of day-to-day activities required to see the operation through the busy season. Supporting the staff, who in turn support our users and members is most assuredly a full-time job! We downsized the Team Leader pool from four to three this year, which added to their team size, but we also introduced a Team Leader Assistant role to provide busy leaders adequate time for coaching and supporting the agents.

Through the middle of the year, we complete our Business Plan for the next year, and we plan and prepare for changes we want to make when the season slows down. This year’s project work included:

Working with the former JUST (Joint Utility Safety Team) to bring their contact map online on our new website, and to lay foundation for the 2023 pilot project that will see overhead assets registered and an auto-response going back to excavators about proceeding safely when overhead assets are in their work area
Registering Orphaned Wells with USP. As of this week, when an excavation is taking place near an orphaned facility, the excavator will receive notice from the Orphaned Wells Association and will be provided with instructions on how to proceed.
A Cloud - contact centre server moved. In order to keep all of our recorded call data inside of Canada, we moved our entire cloud contact centre server from the US to Montreal. You didn’t even notice, did you?
Continuous development of the PelicanCorp OneCallAccess software. We work closely with Pelican to bring continuous improvements to our stakeholders. Many of the items we worked on have been more than three years in the making, and we are excited that we should see the fruits of our labour before the end of 2023.
Creation of our Cyber Security policy. Cyber Security is a growing concern of all businesses, so we have put more preventative measures in place and created an action plan in the event of a cyber security breach.

In the Fall, we were attending the CCGA’s Damage Prevention Symposium in Whistler. It was great to be together in person again after two years of virtual contact. We also started planning our first in-person Alberta symposium as Utility Safety Partners. Join us in Red Deer in March, won’t you?

As 2022 came to a close, we completed post-mortems for projects and departments. This important step gives our staff an opportunity to review what went well over the year, and what can be improved. Out of those meetings, we came away with a new list of things to keep us busy in 2023! A new year brings new targets! We did great work in 2022, and I’m looking forward to seeing us get even better from here.

Sher Kirk - USP Operations Director