Corporate Social Responsibility Davao Light Sustainability

Davao Light speeds up responding to unplanned outages, increases customer satisfaction

April 04, 2022

As part of its commitment to provide quality service to its customers, Davao Light and Power Co., Inc. (Davao Light) has continued to immediately respond to reports on unscheduled power interruptions, and further amps up its strategy by implementing the Prompt, Rapid and Responsive Diagnostics approach.

Developed in-house, the initiative was created to improve the company's response time and is anchored on the principles of the Psychology of Waiting.

This includes creating a one-man crew on a motorbike, who will be deployed first to counter traffic, enabling the responder to go to the location faster and explain to the customer what the problem is and how it will be addressed. As a result, this allows Davao Light to increase its chance to respond quickly and identify the concern within a timeframe of 30 minutes.

“Though it is not possible to eliminate waiting time when responding to concerns such as unscheduled power interruptions, we developed this strategy to give customers a better experience and minimize their waiting time,” said Davao Light Assistant Vice President for Engineering Operations Orville C. Lazaro.

Aside from improving response time, the new approach is all about the customers' safety.

“Every time we receive a call for immediate action, we treat it as urgent because any electrical-related trouble may cause a house to burn or may mean someone’s life could be in danger. The one-man crew will be there to assess the safety condition, initiate quick fixes as applicable, and recommend a course of action to immediately address the customer’s needs. The one-man crew will also give advice to the customer to ensure their safety,” Lazaro explained.

It has been more than two years since the one-man crew initiative was implemented and in February 2021 the more detailed execution commenced.

Based on the data collected throughout the years, around 90% of the volume of calls are within 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.. This led the Engineering Team of Davao Light to also leverage technology, adjust the schedule of some crews and move them to a strategic location, as well as reinforced their competencies to intensify the approach.

Lazaro added, “Apart from providing quality service, Davao Light also values innovation. With this, we will be applying more strategies in the coming years to make our customer response time faster. We will further strengthen this by reducing volumes of calls thru proactive maintenance initiatives, equipping our emergency crew responders with the right knowledge and training, and enhancing our applications and state-of-the-art tools and equipment."

Davao Light, an AboitizPower subsidiary, serves more than 458,000 customers in the cities of Davao and Panabo, and the municipalities of Carmen, Dujali and Sto. Tomas.