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10 The Authority | February 2025 T he I mportance of P roactive C ustomer C ommunication By Julie A. Mechling Director of Customer Service Pittsburgh Water Pittsburgh Water has made great progress in recent years enhancing the customer experience. As we continue to lead as a utility of the future, we are identifying opportunities to proactively communicate with our customers so they can benefit from our array of customer assistance programs and self-service tools. While we are proud of our current level of service, our historical approaches to customer communication have largely been reactive. Examples of these efforts include: • Answering customer calls in less than one minute on average; • Allowing customers the ability to provide their name and preferred telephone number to receive a callback while maintaining their place in the queue; • Text messaging our customers when a Pittsburgh Water plumber or field technician is on their way for a scheduled appointment; • Leveraging artificial intelligence to improve email handling and customer response time; • Offering after-call customer surveys; • Providing a customer advantage portal to promote 24/7 self- service and leak alerts; and • Maintaining a service outages outbound calling process and webpage. In 2024, Pittsburgh Water Customer Service focused on stability within the aforementioned offerings and launched a First Call Resolution (FCR) project. Through the FCR project, we are concentrating on the reduction of requeued calls, live call monitoring, real time management alerts at various queue thresholds, and the calculation of an FCR rate. Being available to our customers is the first step in gaining their trust. The second step is making the most of that initial interaction. Pittsburgh Water has identified proactive, individualized customer communication as the next best method to continue to enhance services for our customers. The best example we currently have is our regular engagement of customers at community meetings and events: Since 2022, our PGH2O Cares, Public Affairs, and Engineering teams have participated in an average of 138 community engagement opportunities annually. Realizing that not everyone may have the time to respond to our calls to action in newsletters, bill inserts, mailers, or press releases, we have more recently increased the methods and frequency with which we intentionally communicate with our customers to tailor specific content to those who may benefit the most. We leveraged third party, web-based applications that utilize existing customer data to distribute information securely via email addresses, outbound telephone calls, and text messages. Here are some examples of our email, telephone, and text messaging campaigns: • In February 2024, we began texting residential customers who are struggling financially to encourage them to enroll in our customer assistance programs. Our target audience is customers who appear to be income-qualified based on their enrollment in a payment plan or one of our assistance programs. We are engaging them to work with a PGH2O Cares employee to complete their application for all possible assistance. When we connect with a valid cellular telephone number but do not receive the desired customer response, we reach back out to the customer with a follow-up text to further encourage enrollment. For those cell numbers deemed invalid, Cares personnel attempt personal telephone calls to