Enhancing outage management communication processes

Inconsistent communication during outages — notifications and restoration-time estimates — was contributing to a poor experience for 1 in 4 Xcel Energy customers who lose power.

Partnering with the Customer Experience team, I and another experience designer interviewed internal stakeholders across the outage-communication process. Those insights, alongside existing process documentation and customer research, shaped a full-day interactive working session with a cross-functional team representing key areas responsible for outage resolution and communication.

I designed the working session around our key project objectives, creating three separate but connected activities:

Three service blueprints

Three common outage scenarios were prioritized for blueprinting:

The final designed service blueprint for each prioritized outage scenario maps the experience of customers and each internal stakeholder group — Call Center, Field Crew, Dispatch, Control Center, Communications, and Support Processes — across the before, during, and after phases of an outage. Key activities are connected to show where actions are sequential or interdependent across teams, and a dedicated Support Processes lane surfaces the outage-management software touchpoints that would feed future requirements definition.

A second view layered in the pain points that cross-functional working groups identified as having the largest negative impact on their ability to do their work effectively — and by extension, on the quality of the customer experience. These became the primary opportunity areas driving ideation.

Napkin-pitch overviews

Though the engagement was scoped around current-state validation, we captured initial overviews of the concepts generated during ideation — each with a title, description, intended audience, and perceived value for the customer and Xcel Energy — as an input to future work.