Weathering The Storm Together

When extreme weather hits, spare a thought for the thousands of staff working for utility companies that struggle through appalling and sometimes dangerous conditions to get the power back on and make sure you’re safe.

We have worked with Western Power Distribution (WPD) as their digital partners for the last 2.5 years. This includes work across all of their web platforms allowing them to provide online services to the 7.9 million customers they supply electricity to.

The storms of early 2020 have been unprecedented and have affected many millions of people across the country, but luckily we had a plan in place to make sure that WPD’s website and critical infrastructure weathered the storm and stayed available to their customers when it mattered most.

For example, during Storm Ciara in mid-February over 166,000 homes in the WPD area were without power, as you can imagine the first thing people do is look for information using their phones. As a result, the WPD website and power cut application saw traffic that was over 1,000% higher than the previous days. In real terms this meant that the site saw between 1,000 and 2,000 concurrent users throughout the day - and successfully managed this with no loss in performance.

Not only did WPD and Enigma make sure that we had thoroughly prepared the sites and their architecture to manage these significant increases in traffic, we also initiated our planned website service for the situation to help guide customers to important information when they need it most. We call this “Storm Mode” which initiates a version of the site wholly dedicated to providing customers with information during storms like these.

As well as providing live information on power cuts via the power cuts application Storm Mode also allows WPD to provide customers with a regular headline status updates, clear calls to action and helpful tips for taking care during a power cut. As well as web updates, tens of thousands of text updates were sent to customers to proactively keep them informed. The WPD social media team also went into overdrive, providing as much information to customers as possible via Twitter and other social channels.

Feedback from customers has been excellent, showing that when the storm of the century hits it pays to be prepared - so that you can provide industry leading service to your customers when they need it most.

If you have a software development or website project you want to talk to us about – get in touch