Do Your Ad Hoc Communications Need a Little TLC?

Layna Shuppert 5/17/21 3:16 PM 6 min read

A Quick Symptom Checker

Friday Night Lights…Out

FridayIt’s Friday. The hurricane on course to veer left…skews right. Or maybe Kelly Careless tosses a lit cigarette into the dry brush. Or perhaps Dylan Distracted updates Instagram…and takes down a power pole.

Whatever the cause, unexpected outages happen every day (and especially on Fridays, it seems).

Whether they affect hundreds--or hundreds of thousands--of customers, outages are a surefire way to test the general health and wellness of your communications solutions…but by then, it may be too late. Perhaps it’s time for preventative care.

Time for a Check-Up

Check these symptoms to learn if a wellness plan is in order.

Symptom Checker

  1. Data Distress

    When an unexpected outage event occurs, do you find yourself frantically culling data from disparate sources? Are you reliant on someone to do this for you because the complexities involved are too intricate? Does this process take longer than 15 minutes?


  2. Sickly Segmentation

    Once you’ve gathered the necessary data (finally!), it’s time to segment it, so you’re delivering the most accurate messages to the appropriate audiences. Are you able to parse your data with ease? Or is it a cumbersome endeavor that makes you queasy just thinking about it?


  3. A Painful Approval Process

    You’ve created your message, and now it’s time to get it approved. From tracking down the necessary approvers to managing editorial cycles, to endless rounds of final sign-offs, is your approval process painful? Once communications are blessed, has the entire situation changed, requiring you to return to square one?


  4. Sluggish Circulation

    How well does the actual delivery of your communications fare? Is it as seamless as a one-touch deployment? Do you experience clogs based on the sheer number of communications you’re sending?


  5. Call Center Side Effects

    As a result of the lengthy process to get communications delivered to your customers, does your customer service center become overwhelmed with inbound calls?


  6. The Follow Up

    On the continuous improvement front, after the event passes, does your system offer post-mortem reporting to analyze what went right—and what didn’t?

 

Utilities with healthy communication solutions have enjoyed significant success in each of the abovementioned pain points. Bill Joiner, co-founder and managing member of Message Broadcast, will share a proven prescription for success during his Chartwell PowerUp session, “Say Something: Communicating with Customers During the Moments That Matter,” Tuesday, June 8th, 2021, at 11:45 a.m. ET.

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Layna Shuppert

Marketing Communications Manager