The storm is coming for Ruby Irigoyen—literally, not metaphorically.

Tropical Storm Nicole is headed toward her home state of Florida as we’re talking today, and she’s getting ready—not just personally but professionally as well. Storms are big business for Ruby and her company ENCO Utility Services. Why? Well, for many small utilities in the state—and across the U.S., as they have offices in California and Tennessee as well as Florida—when consumers call into their utility for billing information, answers about services, or to notify someone a household has lost power, they’re speaking with someone from Ruby’s team, either in a physical call center or via a remote connection.

And during a storm event, it’s even more likely that someone Ruby trained is picking up the phone.

Starting at 4:30 pm ET Wednesday, they’ll begin to take over calls from utility clients following the roll of Nicole from the East side of the state toward the Northwest. As the volume increases, Ruby and her specialty-trained customer-service reps will do everything from note incoming customer information to dispatching field crews—although the exact way ENCO supports each utility is customized and controlled entirely by the utility itself.

A couple of smaller utilities in the fold really prefer to dial directly into ENCO’s systems but do the dispatching themselves while ENCO takes the inbound. A very specific Miami-Dade County-based municipality prefers to route ENCO’s outage management system into the utility’s call center and work from the software internally during an emergency. One tribal authority leads all in-person training with their cultural focus on residential customers.

Each utility in the path of Nicole has its own set of rules and preferences, and Ruby’s team adapts to all of them, which sounds like a superhuman feat but is simply years and years of experience guiding each situation.

Both Ruby and ENCO came from Southern California Edison (SCE). Ruby as a valued customer service employee and ENCO as a spin-off of SCE to help small and medium-sized utilities better prep for and adapt to emergency call situations. (They were a subsidiary created in 1997 as Edison Utility Services.) The first few years were hard. Back then, was tough to convince utilities to outsource services overall, especially any service with a direct customer affiliation.

“You’re absolutely right,” Irigoyen said. “When we were first started, utilities were very reluctant to do this, but we reached a real tipping point in the industry about five years ago. I remember I went to a meeting explaining our services to a medium-sized public utility, and the executive told me, ‘I’m doing a happy dance; you speak electric.”

Beyond that inclusive language set, other industry trends have, of course, helped to guide (or sometimes push) utilities towards call center outsourcing:

(1.) a shift in mindset from regulatory/legality-first thinking to customer-first thinking,

(2.) a change in work culture from revenue-based to community-based,

(3.) a growing issue with workforce issues and staffing over the last two decades, and

(4.) COVID restrictions, which changed how people could work in-person, exacerbating the staffing issues in turn, and has also created a high-volume of collections to tackle post-pandemic—beyond what most small utilities have the capacity to handle.

All of those elements have converged to make outsourcing a bigger part of the utility business across the board from software and cloud services to—as we’re talking about here—call center staffing, but one thing has never changed from Ruby’s days at Southern California Edison:  It’s all about the soft skills when it comes to dealing directly with a utility’s customer.

“We tell everyone—and everyone is trained to take calls and will take calls, even me—when you’re on the phone, you’re not you anymore. You’re the voice of the utility you represent today,” Irigoyen said. “So, check your tone. Listen. Take notes. Repeat those concerns back for clarity. Empathize. Sympathize. Apologize—no matter whose fault it is. You’re not apologizing to accept blame. You’re apologizing to support their feelings in this situation, which are perfectly valid.

“You want that customer to know that you’ll help in any way possible. Sadly, sometimes you can’t, but you can convey that in the nicest way possible. It’s the way you tell them that makes the difference,” she added.

As we’re talking about training and soft skills, Ruby’s keeping an eye on weather changes as Nicole changes path, noting out loud that it’s going to miss one of their utilities while shifting into the path of another.

Over the next three days as Nicole makes landfall and moves across Florida, Ruby and her team will have staff working on emergency service orders around the clock.

I ask her if she’s nervous or if 40 years working the phones for utilities around the country have made her take it all in stride.

“Oh, I’m always a little nervous with every storm event,” she replied. “I think when you stop getting nervous, you start getting complacent, and every single one of these people calling in who need help … you can’t be complacent and serve them properly.”

Ruby Irigoyen is Senior Vice President for ENCO Utility Services, a provider of bundled utility services for municipal and private utilities since formed by Southern California Edison parent company Edison International in 1997.

Former industry editor Kathleen Wolf Davis is Director of Digital Marketing for ESC Partners, a company that crafts, supports, and ties together software that enables the modern smart city from back offices to electric, water, and gas utility functions.

ENCO Utility Services and ESC Partners work together to cover the utility and municipality SaaS and service market.