Essential Energy: Optimising digital communications with a multi-channel solution
Overview
Responsible for building, operating, and maintaining Australia’s largest electricity network, Essential Energy delivers critical electricity network services to more than 800,000 homes and businesses in 1,500 regional, rural, and remote communities, operating across extremes of terrain and climate.
The New South Wales (NSW) Government-owned corporation also provides water and sewage services to 20,000 customers in Far West NSW. Employees based in depots and offices across three regions are responsible for building and maintaining almost 200,000 kilometres of power lines, 1.4 million power poles, 136,000 distribution substations, and 326 zone substations that span a diverse geographical area.
The challenge
Achieving successful digital communication across this vast, distributed workforce is as difficult as it is important. Essential Energy’s employees must be able to receive critical communications at all times, whether in an office or in the field. This means messages must be available over multiple channels and delivered via a resilient and streamlined solution.
However, what Essential Energy had in place was a number of basic bulk SMS products that were unable to meet the organization’s communications requirements. These services only provided simple SMS messaging, without functionality across multiple channels.
Essential Energy needed an integrated messaging and communication solution to help manage the variety of business-critical and higher service-level communications that needed to be sent to its employees every day. It found this solution in Whispir.
The platform also provides complete accountability and auditability with uninterrupted audit trails and real-time reporting of communications, even when accessed from mobile devices."
The solution
Increased functionality
The SMS functionality in the Whispir solution is more robust than basic bulk SMS solutions. At the same time, Essential Energy gained advanced multichannel capabilities – useful for reaching people who are travelling or moving to different sites.
Communications management for a variety of uses
Essential Energy can now more easily manage communications for different audiences and purposes – including crisis and incident management, business continuity, field operations, and IT service management – all in one place. In addition, Whispir offers a teleconference management tool that allows employees to instantly call key stakeholders in the event of an incident, without needing meeting numbers or PINs.
Role-specific messaging
Staff now only receive communications relevant to their area of business. Each business unit and line of business has their own workspace within the platform that contains different message templates for day-to-day requirements.
Greater resilience
The Whispir platform is managed centrally in a hosted solution, which reduces risk and improves the organization’s resilience.
Improved communication processes
Communications can now be sent faster while containing more accurate content and reliably reaching the right people. These improved processes, in turn, increase organisational resilience, improve transparency and compliance, and help create a safer working environment.
With Whispir, high-volume, targeted messages can be sent to employees and key stakeholders wherever they may be, even if internal hardware systems fail. This resilient functionality, combined with enhanced multichannel capabilities, has brought significant improvements to Essential Energy’s processes. The company is now more secure in its ability to communicate with its distributed employees – thereby helping them keep the lights on in homes and businesses across NSW.
