Oncor’s Joel Austin Shares Path to Seamless Customer Engagement
By Keith Pierce, Senior Research Manager
During the EMACS Conference held in October, attendees heard a keynote address from Joel Austin, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer with Oncor Electric Delivery. Oncor serves 13 million customers across Texas.
During his address, Austin shared about Oncor’s digital transformation. Launched several years ago, the project has taken place alongside a $50 billion investment in new transmission and distribution technology to keep pace with the growth taking place across the utility’s territory. Noting that consumers want from their utility what they want from any other service provider, Austin said that “our growth story is interesting, but it’s all about reliability.”
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As part of Oncor’s transformation, Austin said that the utility stood up a cross-functional team to develop “a set of principles around which we would work.” These principles included:
- Keep customers first
- Keep reliability and safety in the lens at all times
- Provide consistent communication
- Give customers the information they want
- Be early, accurate, and transparent with customer communications
Oncor moved from a sometimes-fragmented communications strategy during outages toward an integration of operations, customer engagement, and other teams that now provides customers with information that is personalized to their needs and location. In Austin’s words, the data that is provided, along with how it’s provided and how frequently, has changed dramatically in the last year and a half.”
👉 On the blog: Embracing Digital Channels in the Utility Sector.
Oncor has developed a more robust information architecture system to aggregate and enrich its existing data. Data comes from customer systems, metering systems, outage systems, and other sources in real time, and the flow of data is managed with artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure optimal data management and share the best possible information across the enterprise and with customers.
Austin emphasized the importance of building customer narratives to ensure frequent updates, fill in knowledge gaps, and provide information to customers consistently through as many channels as possible. He noted that there is a natural tension during a storm event between operations and customer engagement teams, with one team wanting to have accurate information before it’s shared and the other wanting to be able to communicate as quickly as possible.
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