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, XCELab interviewed internal stakeholders across the outage-communication process. Those insights — alongside existing process documentation and customer research — shaped a full-day interactive workshop with the cross-functional team.

Three service blueprints

For each prioritized outage scenario, the primary blueprint mapped activities for every stakeholder group before, during, and after an outage — connecting key activities where actions are sequential or interdependent across teams. A dedicated "support processes" lane surfaced the outage-management software actions that would feed a future requirements session.

A secondary view called out the pain points working groups prioritized as having the largest negative impact — used as opportunity areas to inspire future-experience 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.