Customer Outage Alerts and Personnel Notification
Milsoft Offers two packages. Milsoft Customer Outage Alerts provides your utility with the means of communicating to customers via email, texting and voice notifications based on parameters established by your utility. Notifications can be configured to send automatically or manually sent based on outage criteria from Milsoft OMS System (DisSPatch).
Milsoft also offers a better way to stay in touch with your crews and key employees. Milsoft Personnel Notification is a configurable communications solution for contacting select employees based on variety of trigger events or scenarios as required by you, our customer. Milsoft Personnel Notification deploys email, and/or text, and/or voice calls to complete the Notification process.
OutageMessenger allows the user to create distribution lists with criteria from key fields in the outage table.
Examples
- Provides system-wide outage overviews to management team.
- Notify district managers when an outage affects their district.
- Notify executives when an outage affects more than 100 customers.
- Notify key account managers when priority customers are affected.
- Notify foremen when outages occur in their district.
Prior to adding this capability the utility must have the infrastructure in place necessary to support these services. The basic requirements are listed below.
- If E-mail is to be used, there must be a SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server in place. In most instances, the existing mail server will suffice.
- Texting (SMS) requires a relationship with an SMS Gateway. This gateway is not unlike the gateway used to reach a payment provider when authorizing credit card payments. Currently, the Milsoft IVR supports gateways provided by TextPower.
- SMS Gateways generally have a short-code and a keyword to which utility customers/members subscribe. It will be the responsibility of the utility to secure this short-code from the gateway provider.
- Federal regulations require opt-in subscription service for most text messages. This is due primarily to the fact that the receiving party will be charged for the text. It will be the responsibility of the utility to conceive and implement a plan for registering customers for the texting service.
- It should be noted that SMS Gateways manage the subscriptions, and facilitate the delivery of messages to phones through a variety of carriers.
Customer Outage Alerts
During outages, nothing is more effective at keeping customers calm than information. When the lights go out, customers just want to know that your utility is aware of the problem(s) and doing everything possible to restore power. With Customer Outage Alerts, you can get the communications tasks done!
Milsoft Customer Outage Alerts provides your utility with the means of communicating to customers via email, texting and voice notifications based on parameters established by your utility. Notifications can be configured to send automatically or manually sent based on outage criteria from Milsoft OMS System (DisSPatch).
- Provide customers with current outage information including:
- Known outage areas
- Current restoration efforts
- Notify customers with updates or information regarding their services
You’ve got better things to do with your time during outages.
Personnel Notification
Milsoft Personnel Notification is a configurable communications solution for contacting select employees based on variety of trigger events or scenarios as required by you, our customer. Milsoft Personnel Notification deploys email, and/or text, and/or voice calls to complete the Notification process.
Key Functions
- Multiple phone numbers and email addresses
- Automatic retries
- Call one employee at a time until someone “acknowledges”
- If no one “acknowledges” (by pressing 1), the list can be reactivated or activate another group
- Monitoring and reporting tools
- Dynamic and interactive content
Personnel Notification of OMS Related Events
- Key Account involved in Outage
- Verified Outage (with status changes)
- Outage affecting more than 100 customers (with status changes)
- Estimated Time of Restoration has expired
- Outage lasting longer than one hour
- Outage Reported (OMS) (each consumer level outage ticket created)
- All above events can be made available by district
Features
Provide customers with current outage information including (Partial List for Customer Outage Alerts and Personnel Notification):
- Known outage areas
- Current restoration efforts
- Notify customers with updates or
- Information regarding their services
- Key Account involved in Outage
- Verified Outage (with status changes)
- Outage affecting more than 100 customers (with status changes)
- Estimated Time of Restoration has expired
- Outage lasting longer than one hour
- Outage Reported (OMS) (each consumer level outage ticket created)
- All above events can be made available by district
Hardware Requirements
Requirements for Personnel Notification
- Milsoft DisSPatch OMS 8.6.4 or higher
- Text Power
- Milsoft IVR 7.39 or higher with Customer Notification
Requirements for Customer Outage Alerts
- Texting capabilities require a 3rd party gateway provider to ensure compliance with all FCC, FTC, CTIA and MMA regulations.
- Milsoft can help with selecting a provider with proven integrations to Milsoft software.
- Voice notifications require Milsoft IVR 7.39
- Milsoft DisSPatch OMS 8.6.4 or higher