What have we learned?
Alliander always aims to perform its duties and activities to the best of its ability. But certain incidents, developments and events can still have unforeseen consequences. We want to learn from these experiences in order to further enhance the quality of our organisation. In this section, we present some key moments and events in 2017.
Customer communication during power outage in Amsterdam
What happened?
In August a street lighting failure occurred on the Overtoom in Amsterdam. Various local residents contacted us to say this made them feel unsafe. Our target is to resolve such faults within ten days, so we immediately planned the necessary action. The power supply in the area needed to be cut off to carry out the repair safely. As always, customers were sent a letter four working days in advance notifying them that there would possibly be no electricity between 9am and 3pm. The owners of businesses on the Overtoom – including a hotel, a chemist store and six shops – were not happy about this. No electricity means no electronic payments, no lighting and, hence, no income. These business owners felt we were not listening to them, so they took their complaint to the media.
What have we learned?
We entered into a dialogue with the businesses involved. We explained what the problem was and what our work entailed. And, above all, we listened. We noticed that customers find it annoying when they are not consulted about the best time to carry out the work. The business owners also found that the letter was too impersonal and sent too late. Customers expect a proactive dialogue from Liander in situations like this. We learned that customer expectations have changed and that we as a network operator must do more to minimise the inconvenience for local businesses and residents when carrying out such repairs.
Evaluation of renewed standby and outage response shifts
What happened?
In October 2016, the standby and outage response rosters for our engineers were adjusted to prevent violations of the Working Hours Act. The aim was twofold: to reduce the health & safety risks for our employees and customers that arise from frequent and long overtime hours; and to bring the shifts more into line with the actual outage pattern as most failures occur after 5pm. The increased frequency of outage response shifts means that fewer colleagues are needed for the outage pool and staff can be allocated more efficiently. After six months we evaluated the adjusted standby and outage response shifts, partly because the engineers said they were unhappy with the new rosters.
What have we learned?
Following the introduction of the new rosters violations of the Working Hours Act have halved in number. And the more compact outage response organisation enables a smarter deployment of staff. The downside is the additional strain on some of our engineers. In several regions, a substantial number of our colleagues are doing more than the agreed eleven or twelve shifts annually. This impinges on their personal life. To resolve this issue, Alliander carried out a further study into staggered working hours and standby outage staffing. Trials were conducted to test new models. The aim is to put a new model in place in 2018.
A thousand reactions to reliability of smart meter
What happened?
A laboratory test of the University of Twente demonstrated that the smart meters could be tampered with to give faulty readings. Netbeheer Nederland (Association of Energy Network Operators in the Netherlands) was informed of the test results towards the end of 2015. In 2016, we investigated tens of customer complaints about the smart meters. No faulty readings were found. The possible unreliability of the smart meter prompted a consumer watchdog programme to call upon customers to come forward if they had doubts about their energy consumption after the smart meter was installed. The programme received some 3,000 reactions from customers, including one thousand reactions in the Liander service area.
What have we learned?
In March, Liander set up a special team to deal with all the reactions we received. In our interviews with the customers we discussed their energy consumption and possible reasons for the high meter readings. In addition, we performed administrative analyses at customers and, in a few cases, also consumption analyses using a second meter for reference. We found that customers felt that their complaints about high energy consumption were not always handled well, and often did not understand how this high energy consumption came about. As a result, they did not trust the smart meter, even though it worked properly in all cases. One important learning point for Liander was to listen carefully to customers and to be more active in helping them to understand why the energy consumption was higher than expected.