APPA Customer Connections Conference Visits Nashville by Jeremy Elrod

Last week APPA’s Customer Connections Conference was held at the Loews Vanderbilt in Nashville. The annual three day conference offered dozens of sessions in the areas of customer service, energy services, key accounts and public communications. After attending sessions in all four areas, much of the information I learned in the public communications really struck an interest in me. During my three years with TMEPA, I am sometimes in awe of how municipal electric utilities serve their communities. In particular, I am continually impressed the lengths they will go, the value they place on doing what is best for their customers, and the pride they take in public power. However, communicating the impact and level of service a utility provides can be difficult. Here are some of things I learned that could help us better get across the good work of municipal electric utilities.

Creating your own content. An easy and inexpensive way to share your utility’s story is to create and distribute your own content. The quality of smartphone cameras allows anyone to take high quality video or pictures, and social media provides easy and cheap avenues to distribute it. This content can be shared directly to the public without going through traditional media, which sometimes will even share the content themselves.

Video is today’s best type of content. Video has become one of the biggest ways people interact. Videos, particularly those under one minute, are incredibly popular to view and share. For utilities they provide a way to share with customers things "behind the scenes," such as an update on an outage or a large project. Morristown Utilities’ Instagram account was highlighted in one of the sessions on this topic. As is often the case, what may be ordinary to someone who works every day doing something could be fascinating and extraordinary to others.

Pay to get your social media seen. While most utilities have social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter, posts and tweets aren’t seen by enough people sometimes due to algorithms that determine what actually comes up on someone’s screen. Sponsoring or boosting posts is an effective way to make sure your Facebook fans or people in the community see important posts or information. The audience that sees the sponsored content can be really narrowed to a particularly audience, like millennials or certain area of your service territory. Most are surprised at how inexpensive it is to pay for sponsored posts, where literally $20 dollars can get thousands of people to view content or messages you really want to get out.

Update our jargon. As industries evolve, the terminology should evolve too. The Edison Electric Institute (EEI) has put together a list of terms and phrases that better describe and communicate the sometimes complicated topics of the electric utility industry to the every day person. A few examples: use customer instead of ratepayer, energy instead of electricity, energy company instead of utility, private solar instead of rooftop solar, universal solar instead of utility scale solar, energy delivery charge instead of distribution charge. Using at least some of these phrases could mean customers better receiving whatever message you may be trying to get across. For a full list of the EEI terms, visit here.

Customers give us a short window. The term "sound bite" has a negative connotation because of its use by politicians, but as a concept it’s one to keep in mind for any company as it communicates with its customers. The average sound bite is 8.9 seconds. Why is this important for electric utilities? Because it means that whatever message a utility is trying to get across, it has to be short, concise, informative and impactful. Crafting or writing a message that is all of those things is difficult, but to get it across to customers it’s important to keep in mind because of the time your customers give you.

Of course there was more discussed at the conference than the above, such as the new regulations on calling and texting customers which we wrote about in August. We’re happy to help any TMEPA member implement anything discussed during the conference. An electric utility could be doing everything right and a pillar of service in the community, but customers need know about what their electric utility is doing so they can understand the value they get when they pay their bill every month.