A massive overhaul of customer service systems at Duquesne Light Co. has progressed without major glitches, according to the utility, but that could be tested with the roll-out of new state rules created in response to consumer complaints following last year’s electric rate spikes.
While other electric utilities have also been struggling to comply with a rule allowing customers to switch suppliers outside of the normal billing cycle, the regulatory change hit the Downtown-based electric utility in the middle of its largest tech upgrade in 20 years.
“Our former system did not provide the flexibility for us to evolve the ways in which we engage with our customers,” said Jessica Rock, director of communications for the company.
Duquesne Light’s customer care and billing system is one of six interconnected systems upgraded as part of Focus, a series of technological upgrades that went live Nov. 28. Focus — an acronym of For Our Customers — has entered a “stabilization period” of three to six months.
Though much of the grunt work occurs behind the scenes, Ms. Rock said, there are noticeable benefits for its 500,000 customers in Allegheny and Beaver counties.
Customer account numbers no longer change when a person moves, and those who live in multiple locations can have seasonal addresses that no longer expire. Scheduling service requests is simpler and more efficient because customer service representatives can now send a digital work order to crews on the ground.
The system also lays the technological groundwork for the development of smart meters that will allow customers to monitor closely their energy usage and generation costs.
Last week, customer service staff sat in cubicles that filled a large, well-lit room on the sixth floor of Duquesne’s Seventh Street headquarters. There, they typically field an average of 80 calls to 100 calls a day and receive about 9,000 requests per month from customers who wish to change suppliers.
During the Focus transition, Ms. Rock said, the company is working out some kinks manually and has hired about 30 additional customer service staff.
But the program faces an unforeseen logistical challenge: rules issued last summer by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission that require electric utilities to allow customers to change electric generation suppliers multiple times during a month and within three days of notifying the utility.
The PUC’s mandate, which addressed so-called accelerated or “off-cycle” switching, was a reaction to the wave of complaints from electricity customers who had signed up for variable rates from a competitive supplier and saw their monthly bills spike during the polar vortex in March 2014. Instead of waiting another month to switch to another supplier, those customers demanded a quicker switch.
In documents last May seeking comments on the proposed rules, the commission acknowledged “the public interest requires extraordinary measures be taken.” Just one other state — Texas — has required a time frame for allowing customers to switch as quickly as in Pennsylvania, while regulators in New York and Maryland are mulling the idea.
“For competitive states — states with deregulated electricity markets and competitive suppliers — states are trending this way more and more,” explained Robin Tilley, PUC spokeswoman.
The commission eyed Texas’ model while considering the rules, but there are key differences. Texas regulators, for example, have jurisdiction over the regional transmission organization that moves electricity through the state’s grid, which is not the case in Pennsylvania.
In the end, the PUC’s model is its own, Ms. Tilley said, allowing customers to do in three days what used to require anywhere from 11 days to 45 days, depending on what part of the billing cycle the customer requested a switch.
For a utility billing systems accustomed to issuing meter readings on a monthly cycle, those measures can wreak havoc.
While generally agreeing that off-cycle switching is a good option for customers, other utilities joined Duquesne in objecting to the PUC’s timeline and filed for waivers that phased in the full rules by this summer.
Last December, every utility but Duquesne met the rule’s first phase, which allows customers one off-cycle switch within a monthly billing cycle. Duquesne complied with that rule just last week, and a single bill can now detail charges of the two different suppliers during the billing period.
“The billing systems that we have currently in place aren’t really to set up to handle an off-cycle switch,” said Scott Surgeoner, spokesman for FirstEnergy Solutions, which owns four utilities in Pennsylvania, including West Penn Power, all of which use the same billing system.
The FirstEnergy utilities asked for a waiver until June 15 to meet the full regulation, citing 13 programming changes necessary to comply with the rule. Doing so is incurring “significant costs,” Mr. Surgeoner said, for the utilities to upgrade existing systems to issue accurate bills anytime in a customer’s monthly cycle. He could not estimate what the final expenses will be.
Duquesne plans to recoup the upfront costs associated with accelerated switching in its next rate case — as the PUC has promised — which won’t be for at least a few years, Ms. Rock said.
Duquesne plans to include the upfront costs of implementation in its next rate case — as the PUC has promised to consider them — which won’t be for at least a few years, Ms. Rock said.
Ritchie Hudson, the Pennsylvania chairman of the Retail Energy Supply Association, an industry group representing electric and gas suppliers, said his group has advocated in support of the rule. While he’s “certainly sympathetic” to the technological expense surrounding off-cycle switching, utilities need to respond as quickly as any other business catering to the ever-changing demands of customers shopping in a functional competitive market.
“We live in a marketplace of instant gratification,” Mr. Hudson said. “In every other industry, service providers are geared around providing very quick customer service turnaround.”
Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore.
Clarification: This story was updated on Feb. 17, 2015 to reflect that the PUC will consider, not guarantee, compensating utilities’ upfront costs of off-cycle switching.
First Published: March 17, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
