Scottish Power

On Boxing Day of 1999, South-West Scotland experienced the worst storms in living memory. The widespread damage left millions without power.

As a result of this Scottish Power commenced a £130m project to rebuild networks and to ensure they could cope better with any future incident on this scale. One of the elements of their service that needed to be improved was the ability to handle calls. At the peak of the storm Scottish Power could not take any further calls to their call centres, therefore callers got an engaged tone.

One outcome of the review of the incident was that Scottish Power wanted to ensure that all callers could be handled in the event of a major incident.

Richard Walters, working in conjunction with Scottish Telecom, now called Thus, and Customer Facing Solutions, showed how the immense problem of handling this number of calls could be handled by existing technology with a few enhancements.

The first break-though was to show what customers needed in an event like this. Firstly, customers needed to know that Scottish Power knew they had a problem and only secondly did they need to have an idea when it would be fixed. This changed the entire technical solution into something affordable and practical.

A solution was devised that in the event of an incident:

• All three call centres in the UK could be used to take calls, they were virtualised.
• The system could detect a caller from an incident area that they already knew about and play a message pertinent to that incident.
• Thus agents could be steered towards calls with new information.
• A system that understood calling metrics on the ground and could automatically request routing changes within the Public switch telephone network was devised.

The solution was inspired, designed and implemented within 6 months.