ALLENTOWN - PPL Electric Utilities says it is delivering on its promise to improve customer phone access during major storm emergencies and provide more accurate restoration times.

The improvements, outlined in a plan recently submitted to the state Public Utility Commission, call for:

• Increasing the number of telephone lines serving the customer contact center by 20 percent.
• Expanding the number of customer service representatives available for emergency calls.
• Leasing capacity with an outside service that can assist with high-volume call periods.
• Improving the telephone interactive voice response and outage management systems to ensure customer outage information can be managed more effectively. Enabling customers to report an outage without multiple attempts will dramatically reduce repeated attempts to reach the company and further reduce peak call volume.
• Refining the process for estimating restoration times for outages so those estimates are more accurate and timely, particularly with larger storms.
• Offering easier ways to report outages via the web and smartphones.
• Increasing communications with customers to provide more proactive status updates to customers, which includes greater use of online social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook.

The multimillion dollar improvement plan is vitally important to alleviate system constraints for emergency periods when customer calls spike. Some items already have been implemented, others are under way and can be completed before the end of the year, and others will take additional time, said David G. DeCampli, president of PPL Electric Utilities.

“We want and need to hear from our customers as much as they want to reach us when such severely damaging storms move through our service area,” said DeCampli. “It was clear from the impact from Hurricane Irene and the late October snowstorm that we had to improve our performance to better serve our customers. We are accountable to our customers and regulators to perform well even under the most difficult circumstances.”