Case Study

Homer Electric - Powered by TASKE

Total darkness. Frigid temperatures. A beautiful, expansive, and unrelenting landscape. Stretching over 3,000 square miles, the Kenai Peninsula is at the heart of extreme Alaskan conditions. Without question, providing power to 28,000 of its inhabitants represents a significant challenge. Nevertheless, Homer Electric is succeeding.

Since 1950, Homer Electric has made customer service a top priority. Owned by its customer members, the electric transmission and distribution co-operative responds quickly to Alaskan power outages with the help of TASKE on a Mitel SX-2000® platform.

A need for TASKE Contact software was first recognized three years ago, says Sandra Ghormely, Homer Electric Manager of Member Services.

"We were changing the way we did business - we were going from a sole operator, to a call center environment as recommended by a benchmark project. Our telephone system dealer, ACS, recommended TASKE to help us manage the transition. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association had also done a few customer member surveys with us and we recognized that handling our call traffic was one of our customers' big concerns. Going to a call center model would help solve that. We had also thought about handling our collections division a little bit differently and thought that we could incorporate TASKE for outbound collections calls as well."

Prior to the TASKE installation, Homer Electric knew they had a high number of calls but were lacking the capability to determine exactly how many, when they were received, and how many were abandoning before talking to a customer service representative.

 

We finally had some validation on what our call volumes are.

"For me, the best part is that we finally have some validation on what our call volumes are," says Marianne Snowden, Member Advocate Supervisor for Homer Electric. "The benefit is, previous to having this system up, we had to rely on our employees to make hand-written tick marks every time they took a call to get an idea of the call volume, and now we have actually started a database that can provide us that detail."

Homer Electric now knows they receive approximately 3,500 calls a month into its call center. Operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the majority of calls are received by its ten agents and three supervisors during regular business hours. However, when a power outage does occur, call volumes can more than triple.

When this happens, TASKE ACD Monitor allows Homer Electric to react quickly and have additional agents log in to handle the increase in calls. The ACD Monitor displays real-time agent and queue statistics, and the review capability provides compiled statistics for the previous 24 hours. The information TASKE provides of ongoing and highly erratic call patterns helps them with staffing requirements says Snowden.

"We can watch the activity, the movement of the inbound and outbound calls, and the time in between calls and it is very helpful in knowing how many people you have (in the queue) at any given time. Plus, with the monitoring feature of TASKE we can see details we never knew before - we have an idea of what calls are being abandoned, how many minutes the average call takes... this is information we were never previously able to obtain."

(With TASKE) we have an idea of what calls are being abandoned, how many minutes the average call takes... These are all details we were never able to obtain.

  

For Shareen Bock, Homer Electric Member Services Specialist, the TASKE reporting feature is what she finds particularly useful. "To be able to handle some of the complaints from the consumer is a big benefit. We can actually go in there and pull a report during that time frame to accurately determine what happened."

As Homer Electric continues to grow in its challenging Northern environment, TASKE will ensure that the hydro company meets and exceeds their customer service goals as they set new standards in the Electric Utility market.

"98% of calls answered in 20 seconds is the service goal that we originally started out trying to achieve," says Snowden. "In the past couple months, because of staffing turnover and changes in the department during the process of reorganization, we decided that we would lower that expectation to 94%, but so far we're averaging 99.1% service factor, so we are really pleased."

 

 

This document is provided to you for informational purposes only. The information is believed by TASKE Technology to be accurate as of the date of its publication, and is subject to change without notice. TASKE Technology assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions in this document and shall have no obligation to you as a result of having made this document available to you or based upon the information it contains. Not all telephone systems support the full functionality of TASKE Call Management Solutions. Contact TASKE Technology Inc. for more information.