Today we’ve introduced the new
Outage Centre to Aucklanders as part of our commitment to continuously improve how power outages are managed.
The Outage Centre allows people to report power outages, find out information about existing ones online, register for automatic updates, and choose how they are kept informed about the progress of restorations.
The Outage Centre is the latest step in a long-term programme to revamp and modernise the way we manage our network, while at the same time offering a way for customers to communicate with us that meets their expectations.
We’ve always strived to provide great customer service, but the widespread power outages in Auckland caused by a powerful storm in April 2018, and the separate data breach of the old app that immediately followed, brought home the ways we can improve.
Both of those events were difficult times for those customers affected. Yet the silver lining was the honest customer feedback, the extensive internal and external reviews, and the important insights we have gained. These have all underpinned the ongoing work to better meet our customers' expectations for communicating and managing power outages on the network.
Our new processes are designed to be able to manage large scale events. For example: within the first 24 hours after the April storm hit, more than 200,000 people used the Vector outage app and website to search for information and report power outages, and we received over 20,000 calls into our call-centre in that same period. This demand significantly impacted the way we responded to and managed reports of power outages and network damage during the days that followed.
While this is just the first iteration of the Outage Centre, it reflects an enormous amount of work ‘under the hood’ and has been thoroughly tested to ensure it continues to perform securely and under heavy demand..
With the introduction of the Outage Centre, we’re actively encouraging our customers to share feedback on their experience with the Outage Centre to help us update and tweak our processes to better suit their needs.
Aucklanders can have confidence we’re learning from our mistakes and doing everything we can to ensure they are better informed during major weather or outage events.
To check out and use the new Outage Centre,
click here.
To provide feedback on the new Outage Centre,
click here.
For further information on how to prevent, prepare for, and stay safe during power outages,
click here.