TexTalk for Utility Companies
In every community, utility companies are responsible for providing essential services to businesses, individuals, and organizations. Utility companies can be responsible for delivering electricity, water, or gas to entire towns, but they generally deal with each of their customers on an individual basis. Of course, when an outage occurs, it may be for a single home or place of business, but it is also quite common for them to affect entire neighborhoods or towns. In essence, a utility company’s communications with customers occur in two main ways. The first is that a company likely sends customers individual messages, perhaps about payments that are past due. The second is when a utility company has to contact all or a portion of its customers a once. While this may be due to the need to spread the word promotions or publish newsletters, it is generally reserved for informing customers about a large outage and providing updates.
Keeping in touch with customers can be difficult for a utility company, but there are ways to make it easier. The TexTalk platform makes it easy for utilities to meet their communications needs better. TexTalk’s capabilities allow it to divide people or organizations on a user’s contact list into groups. For a utility company, these groups might be created based on neighborhood or connection to a water or gas main. The advantage of these types of groups is that when an outage occurs in a specific area, it becomes easier for utilities to figure out who might need to be informed, based on their location. Service providers could then use TexTalk to send messages to only those groups, as TexTalk allows for highly selective messaging.
While TexTalk is useful during a significant outage, its usefulness is not limited to these scenarios. TexTalk’s ability to communicate through various channels, like email, text, voice message, and social media, makes it ideal for communications for individual customers. Customers might receive a personalized message, perhaps through text or email, to remind them about an overdue payment. These same communication channels also provide redundant messaging in the event of an outage. They can be used in conjunction with TexTalk’s mass messaging capability during an outage, or when utilities want to spread their newsletters more widely. TexTalk can be a valuable asset for any utility company trying to enhance its communications abilities, letting them focus on their tasks of providing their essential services to customers.