A new dedicated Power Cuts website for National Grid

Weathering a storm: Keeping the website operational, stable, responsive and supporting customers

During a storm is one of the key times that power cuts happen. As part of improving the digital journey for our client National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED), we recently launched a dedicated website for power cuts incidents and related information.

The new website was very much put through its paces recently with Storm Darragh, which has been cited as being the worst storm to hit the UK in decades, which left two million homes at its worst point without power, causing thousands of incidents at one point being reported via the website. During the first weekend of Storm Darrah, the website received nearly a third of a year's traffic over one weekend, due to the significant upsurge in website visitors.

During the storm we worked in close partnership with the engineering NGED team to ensure that the website remained online, operational and available to support NGEDs customers. In this blog article we share a few insights and highlights behind the new dedicated power cuts portal as well as key highlights of the digital solution, including:

A new portal for all things power cuts

A new portal was built - bringing together all online tools for power outages in one place (the power cuts reporting form, live outage map data, power cuts information pages, dynamic updates and more) - driving improvements to the user interface as well as increasing resilience..

New website content

Website content was migrated over from the existing website to the new dedicated portal – and the opportunity was taken to give the content and layouts a refresh. The website content works hard to deliver the following objectives:

• Keeping customers up-to-date and informed during power cuts events.
• Giving customers information and advice about power cuts, including a live power cut map.
• The ability for customers to report a power cut.

There’s a heavy reliance on digital channels as a source of information, connection, communication and reassurance and as such, an important part of our partnership with NGED, is making sure that its digital estate meets those customer needs, as effectively as possible. In addition, to also ensure that NGED can respond to power cuts accurately and efficiently.

Enabling National Grid to receive and process power cuts reports in (almost) real-time

An important part of this project was enhancing the digitalisation of the power cut reporting process. [Essentially, how the information from the tool is integrated with the internal business processes.]

With the new digital process, when a customer fills in the online application - the data transfer is automated, via a API solution - this enables the information to be available in NGED's management systems almost immediately.

This near real-time information enables NGED to react faster to the event and have near real-time visibility reporting dashboards – which is essential in supporting the aim of providing an optimal experience and service to customers.

A new 'storm mode' version of the website

On the onset of any Storm, the new website allows NGED to activate a planned website service for this situation: a special 'storm mode' version of the power cuts website.

We switch over to a pre-planned version of the website that is dedicated to the Storm that is happening at that time. It shares the same objectives as the 'normal' mode website. It also helps to communicate to customers that 'the network is having a tough time of it at the moment, but rest assured, we are doing everything we can to help you'.

Read in more detail about the 'storm mode' version on our blog and what that entails : 'A dedicated storm mode website for National Grid' when it was activated for Storm Bert in the UK.

Impact of new solution

The new digital journey has proven to reduce the internal business time and resources by up to 88%.

You can view the new website in action here: https://powercuts.nationalgrid.co.uk/

As the digital partner of National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED), we support the large utility provider with delivering outstanding operational performance to its customers across its digital estate, which includes 22 websites.

National Grid Electricity Distribution is the UK's largest electricity distribution network and services nearly 8 million custoners in the East and West Midlands, South West and Wales, delivering essential power to millions of homes and businesses across its regions

If you have a software development or website project you would like to talk to us about, get in touch and talk to our friendly, specialist team.