Every outage used to start with a busy tone.

When a substation trips, thousands of households call one number at once. Each now hears the restoration window for their street.

The Canto channels screen: live channels, the numbers customers reach, and the routing rules.

On a storm night the phones used to be the second outage. Now every caller hears the restoration window for their street, and the address is already logged by the time our crews roll out.

Tomas Klimek

Service Operations Lead

The problem

Voltique supplies four counties from one service number. When a storm took out a substation, a few thousand households called within the hour to ask whether the fault was known and when power would be back, and most heard a busy tone.

A recorded outage message went out of date as soon as it was made, because restoration windows moved as crews reported in. Overnight billing complaints were logged and left until the office opened.

What Canto did

The agent was answering the main number before the winter storms began, with three sources behind it.

Every crew report on the outage map as it arrives, restoration windows included.
A tariff and billing library of 142 documents, from which each billing answer quotes the clause it rests on.
An outage branch in the builder that asks for the address first and logs it against the open fault.

Canto outage line during an open fault: the caller's address asked for first, the street matched to the fault, and the restoration window read back. A card reads Addresses: logged.

SMS was switched on after the first storm and web chat on the outage page before the second. Texts and chats join the thread the call started.

What still goes to a person

A line down, or a caller who depends on powered medical equipment, goes straight to the emergency desk. Corrections above the agent’s credit limit go to the billing team, as does any thread where the tone turns negative twice, with its summary on top.

What changed

Outage nights still bring the calls. Each is picked up in the first second, the caller hears the window for their street, and the address is on the fault record before they hang up. The night team keeps its hours for lines down and for billing disputes.

Chart of calls to Voltique on a storm night, spiking as the fault hits, with every call answered. A card reads Billing disputes: to a person.

At 11:40 p.m. a tenant called about a bill for 1,640 kWh on an apartment that uses about 300 a month. The agent traced it to two estimated readings and asked for a meter photo, which she texted during the call. The correction was above its limit and her replies had turned sharp twice, so the thread went to the billing team with the photo attached. A person reissued the bill, $214 lower, before midnight.

In the spring the agent takes the new connections line, where calls are fewer, questions run longer and nobody is sitting in the dark.