As part of Ramey’s 40th anniversary, we are remembering the stories, successes, and lessons learned from some of the greatest organizations and brands across the country (and world).
For our first interview, Ramey CEO Chris Ray, sat down with Haley Fisackerly, CEO of Entergy Mississippi, a client for more than 15 years.
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Chris:
Haley, thanks for your time. We are talking today about Ramey’s work with Entergy, especially in the area of stakeholder communications. You’ll recall that when we came on board to serve Entergy, there was a new initiative called Integrated Customer Communications (or “ICC” for short). You were the executive sponsor of that effort, and I’m hoping that you can take us back and describe the landscape at Entergy and what led you to invest in better customer communications.
Haley:
Yeah, Chris, the landscape then was difficult. Commodity costs were high, and natural gas prices were driving customer bills up — something that we didn’t have a lot of control over. We had been dealing with weather events that impacted our reliability, and also, we were having some difficult times within our regulatory environment. On top of that, J.D. Power reported that we had one of the worst customer satisfaction scores among utilities across the country, which got the attention of our Board. I had been pushing to do something about this situation, so when we saw those customer satisfaction scores, the head of our utility group got behind the effort, which led to us forming this new ICC initiative. The head of our communications group had a firm that we had often used, a big firm out of New York, a very reputable group. I encouraged him to open up the search to include firms in our geography, too. We went through the process, and right off the bat, Ramey impressed the selection committee.
“Ramey showed us a way that we could talk to our customers differently.”
And it led to a great campaign. We had to learn to talk to our customers in a different way and engage with them in new mediums and channels. It also allowed us to demonstrate to our regulators that we were being proactive in talking to our customers, explaining why we’re doing things, how it’s going to benefit them, and that building this new power plant, or building these substations, or offering new programs like energy efficiency will benefit everybody. And it wasn’t long before customers began to see things differently — and our regulators saw us talking to them, and when we went in with those filings, we had fewer interveners, and more customer and community support, because we could show that people really wanted these things.
Chris:
One of the things that Entergy really leaned into was the idea that we would be more successful letting the employees of Entergy doing the talking versus Entergy, the company, doing the talking. And did that make a difference?
Haley:
Oh, yeah. Because our customers see our employees out there in the field every day. Plus, our employees love this company, and they take great pride in serving our customers and communities. It hurts them more than anything if we’re not perceived well in the community. And Ramey told us, hey, let your employees be the voice of the company. Because they live in these communities, they go to the schools, they go to the local churches, and they are your neighbors. And by putting that human element out there, it really started to have a huge impact on how our customers thought about us. Chris: For those reading this interview who aren’t familiar with Entergy, the core utility consists of five operating companies in four states: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Texas. At the time, each of those OpCos seemed to be speaking their own language. Haley: I will never forget the one thing that jumped out in Ramey’s presentation. You showed a wall of communications materials that came from all over the system. It was all over the place.
Chris:
Yeah, we called it the Tower of Babel.
Haley:
We had five different messages coming from five different OpCos, not to mention the related business units! That wall helped us understand how much we needed to be “on message,” because it was clear that we were not.
Chris:
When you think about stakeholder communications for utilities, it’s kind of easy to understand the broad, brand-related communications that cover the entire system. But there are also times when a particular operating company has a different regulatory calendar than the others. For example, with Entergy Mississippi, you asked us to help you communicate some specific messages to specific audiences in order to help educate decision-makers on the benefits of the investments that the company needed to make. So that was a narrow rather than a broad effort. We asked people to come to a landing page and watch the video, download the position paper, and see the stats and facts about a proposed solution. So I’m curious how those kinds of efforts have helped.
Haley:
Well, those focused campaigns were extremely important, not only in educating key stakeholders, but also providing a level of transparency and clarity within a complex regulatory request. We educated people and gave them tools to learn more if they wanted to understand more. Very successful.
Chris:
One of the other ways that we serve Entergy is with storm communications. We are in a big hurricane alley here in the Gulf States, and we’ve been through several storms together. One of the smart things that Entergy asked us to build is a storm communications plan with specific pre-storm, during-storm, and post-storm messaging, so that it’s easier to communicate in the heat of the moment and let customers know the status of things. So how has that impacted Entergy’s ability to get out in front of a storm instead of playing defense?
Haley:
I’m glad you asked about storm. If there’s a time that you need to be speaking clearly, frequently, and confidently to your customers, it’s during major storms and outages. Storms are going to happen. It’s just where we live, it’s nature. So what Ramey has helped us do is develop the content so we can move quickly, right? And I’m proud to say, right now, we get very high ratings in our industry for our storm and outage communications. What you all did for us, is allow us to move quickly. We may have to tweak it a little bit to be relevant to what that event was, but we knew what we were going to do. We just had to hit a button, and Ramey was ready there to help us deliver our communication.
Chris:
This is the last question. There may be some people in the utility world who may read this interview. When you are out there talking to your peers who run other utilities, are you asked about the benefits of proactive customer communications – and how that drives customer satisfaction – and how that drives better business outcomes?
Haley:
I’ve just returned from an industry conference, where we talked about that very issue. We rely on customer research, J.D. Power customer satisfaction scores, and Net Promoter Scores to understand how well we are doing with our customer communications and customer service. Remember, I told you earlier that pre-ICC, Entergy had one of the worst customer satisfaction scores among utilities across the country? Well today, Entergy Mississippi ranks third in the country of our peer groups under residential and second in net promoter score for business. I had some of our peers at the conference ask, “What is it that you do?” And I told them that we believe in strong customer communications. And you cannot wait for an event to happen to communicate. It’s got to be constant. It’s got to be information that’s relevant to what they need. Customers are concerned about affordability. They may have interests in clean energy. They may want to understand how to manage their bills, but being relevant, being empathetic to what their needs are, and constantly being out there are critical to our success. And it builds trust. With trust, you get the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong, like storms. I used to sit in focus groups, and it would be embarrassing to listen to what customers said about us. But recently, I was listening to a group where 100% of the participants said, “Well if Entergy said that, I trust them.” And when third parties can say, “Hey, my utility is a trustworthy entity,” we got there because Ramey helped us understand how to better talk to our customers and do it in a way that they could receive it. I think that’s why we’re ranked some of the highest among our peer groups in the country.
Chris:
Well congratulations and job well done!
Haley:
You bet. Great to visit with you.
