Westfield Gas & Electric, Massachusetts, is using Everbridge to contact employees, as well as customers and surrounding residents, during severe weather events or power outages.
Westfield often has to deal with severe weather events. Being a utilities company, the company has a responsibility to the community to have an effective communication system in place to inform customers, area residents, and employees on the status of an incident. Specifically in October of 2011 during an ice storm, Westfield did not have an emergency communications system. Power outages and failure of distribution lines were frequently occurring, and because of the lack of a mass notification system, customers were calling in to report outages, flooding the phone system. This proved to Westfield that a new system was necessary.
Previous to implementing the Everbridge system, all of Westfield Gas & Electric’s communications came through its call center. Customers would contact the call center with issues, and Westfield Gas & Electric would then send out crews to investigate the problem and determine if it was their responsibility. This was time-consuming and often a waste of time.
With the Everbridge system, Westfield now offers mobile apps that provide staff in the field with the ability to share photos with system administrators. Being able to see pictures of real-time situations helps Westfield Gas & Electric employees to assess the situation and respond appropriately.
