The Enlightener
June 2004
Front Line Customer Service is Our Priority
That’s the vision of employees at Blue Ridge Electric and its heating fuels subsidiary, Blue Ridge Energies. District leadership teams overseeing front line customer service to the member-owners of Blue Ridge Electric and customers of Blue Ridge Energies developed the vision statement above in conjunction with a renewed focus on customer care and community commitment.
Blue Ridge district leadership teams consisting of the district managers and operations managers were formed late last year and have been working to identify ways to further improve customer service, which has been rated among the highest for electric utilities across the nation. Blue Ridge has a 10-point customer service scale. A sampling of members and customers are surveyed monthly to help measure their satisfaction and pinpoint areas that can be improved. For the past few years, the cooperative has routinely scored above 9.0 and the subsidiary has scored close to 10.
One of the most important initiatives of the team is evaluating internal processes used to serve members and customers. The goal is to identify problem areas and fine tune our processes so that everyone receives an extraordinary customer service experience every time they interact with Blue Ridge.
The process evaluation of establishing new service accounts has been enlightening for the group.
After mapping out the existing process, the team discovered there are numerous steps taken internally, by the member, and by others such as building inspectors, to set up a new electric service. In identifying ways to improve this process and provide higher customer satisfaction, the team is changing some internal processes to make them more efficient. Additionally, more information about individual new service accounts will be available on the company’s computer network so that more employees can assist someone calling in about their new service in progress. Communications with the member will also be increased.
The new process is currently being instituted with computer system adjustments and employee training. In addition to the changes in the process for new services, Blue Ridge is doing a pilot project that involves the Watauga district and the central dispatch in Lenoir. This pilot involves having much more communication with field employees in order to more closely record the status of any job that has been dispatched for that day. Blue Ridge expects to gain efficiencies by having instant access to this information for member inquiries and also to be able to better schedule work.
The district leadership team will be taking on other similar projects throughout the year as they demonstrate how membership matters by leading the effort to provide the highest in customer care to every person we serve.
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The Perspective
An Editorial by Chief Executive Officer Doug Johnson
Why We Use Fiber Optics
As part of our strategic plan and our commitment to providing safe and reliable electric service to our members, we began installing fiber op-tics across our system during the past two years. The primary reason we made this decision was to give our engineers, system operators, and linemen better real-time information about the operation of your electric system.
Fiber optics is the most reliable, efficient vehicle for electric utility communications today, and for us it is a vital link in our system control and operation of substations, transmission lines, and other equipment. Fiber optics is essentially a modern form of telephone lines and provides a more superior link to our equipment than telephone lines, cellular, cable, and other communications formats that we’ve had to rely on in the past.
One of the most significant ways fiber optics benefits Blue Ridge and our members is its enhancement to reliability of the electric system. Fiber optics enables our dispatchers and engineering staff to analyze outage information faster and more accurately, therefore reducing outage times. Better yet, with constant information from our substations flowing over the fiber into dispatchers and engineers, we can avoid an outage in cases where a problem exists because we will be able to pinpoint the cause and correct it before it causes an outage or other complication.
Additionally, fiber optics is a more reliable form of communications. Traditionally, our data has been sent from our substations to our system operators by radio or cell phone. As we all know, radio and wireless forms of communication are not as reliable because of our mountainous terrain and especially at some of our more rural substations.
Once we have all of our substations connected to our fiber optic system we also plan to begin exploring the use of automated meter reading systems (AMR). Recent advancements in AMR may allow us to read your meter by utilizing power line carrier technology from your home or business connected to our fiber system. Obviously, this could provide significant savings to our members if we could read your meter remotely each month.
The use of fiber optics is an exciting technological advancement for your cooperative. Investment in new technologies is an expensive undertaking but I am pleased to let you know that we plan to lease some of our excess fiber capacity to other companies. The revenue from the leases will help to pay for this investment without putting an additional burden on our rates to our members. We have also received a grant from the Rural Internet Access Authority, through an initiative of the state of North Carolina, because our fiber system provides access to broadband services for our members.
This is an exciting and vital strategic stage of your cooperative and one that I believe further demonstrates your cooperative’s commitment to providing first class electric services to our members. I also feel this investment will benefit our communities economically through improved broadband access – and that is a perfect fit with our guiding purpose of “being a shaper of the future for the benefit of our member-owners”!
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Members - get discounted tickets to see . . .
The Platters,
Beary Hobbs' Drifters
and
The Cornell Gunter Coasters
performing in Boone July 31,
7:30 p.m. at Kidd Brewer Stadium.
As a member of Blue Ridge Electric, you can purchase up to four advance adult tickets at the discounted price of $20 (regularly $25) each, or for $22 (regularly $30) the day of the concert. Children’s tickets (12 years and younger) are $5 each.
To order, have your Blue Ridge Electric membership number ready and call the ASU ticket office at 1-800-841-2787 between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. You can also order tickets online at www.BlueRidgeEMC.com. Just look for the ASU Concert Tickets link!
Published monthly by Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation for its 52,234 member-owners.
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