 Welcome to the 'iFactor Informer:
Second Edition' for 2012!
Welcome to the second edition, of the iFactor Informer for 2012. This edition includes some updates on the latest development work around our EnergySuite platform and the associated collection of utility solutions. We continue to progress the development of several partnerships to bring additional data to EnergySuite, along with the creation of new features within the product stack to enhance customer communications, drive cost savings, and increase customer satisfaction. Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to attend several conferences and saw some great presentations highlighting the potential benefits of technologies such as proactive communications and mobile solutions on customer satisfaction. These includes reports from organizations such as Chartwell and JD Powers as well as utility case studies reflecting on the real results being achieved today. It is great to see this growing collection of information validating that utilities can strengthen customer relationships and further engage with them by leveraging these newer technologies and approaches. Read on to get updated on the latest new features in our products, catch up on our new production releases, and of course find our famous "what we're reading" section to help you keep your reading list full! |
iFactor Consulting's Second Annual iConnect Customer Conference iConnect is our annual client conference, where we share the latest iFactor product features and development plans as well as sharing best practicies and case studies on product use around the world. During iConnect, we also work with you, our customers, to drive the priorities and directions for product development in the next year and update you on options and offers for upgrades, product support, and maintenance.
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Customer Communications Management has Never Been Easier; NOTIFI 2.2 Now Available! 
Notifi is one of the key products within iFactor Consulting's EnergySuite, a comprehensive customer communications platform for utilities. Notifi leverages direct interfaces to utility systems along with customer preference management to enable utilities to deliver proactive communications via each customer's preferred channel (2-way SMS texting, voice, and email).
Reporting outages, receiving estimated restoration timeframes, energy usage alerts, and checking account balances are some of the current features available with Notifi. iFactor is committed to developing exciting, relevant products and features to advance the business efforts of utility industry by rapidly adopting industry best practices and evolving technologies. Empowering the consumer, through user-friendly mobile and online technology, fuels today's organizational customer service experience challenges. Notifi 2.1 addresses this challenge and the recent release of Notifi 2.2 extends its versatility with several exciting new features, including: - Customer Preference Management Web Page
- Smartphone Push Alert Support
- Administration Console Enhancements
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Colorado Springs Utilities implements iFactor's Storm Center website map and mobile apps Colorado Springs Utilities now offers their customers near real-time electric outage information with iFactor Consulting's Storm Center product and mobile applications.
Storm Center, an interactive outage map available on the Springs Utilities website (www.csu.org) displays both individual outages and summary information by ZIP code. The map, updated every 10 minutes, provides users with outage details, including cause of outage, location, number of customers and estimated service restoration.
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FirstEnergy Deploys iFactor's Storm Center for Web and Mobile Outage Communications FirstEnergy Corp. has deployed a new outage map across its utility company service territory, providing access to real-time power outage information to the general public. The solution uses an interactive web map to provide easy access to information on the number of customers impacted in any of the counties occupied by FirstEnergy's 6 million customers, along with drill-down capabilities to get details about individual towns or ZIP codes.
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Zaw Naung
Zaw joins iFactor as a full-time Software Engineer in January 16, 2012 and is currently working on the Streetlight Outages (SLO) project. He received a Bachelor degree in Science majoring in Computer Science from Arizona State University (ASU) and from Barrett Honors College in December 15, 2011. He performed his undergraduate honors research on the ongoing Sociolinguistic System (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) and completed his Honors Thesis on it.
His expertise is Java and had a teaching experience in Object-Oriented Program & Data at ASU. While in ASU, he worked his part-time for AMT project, which is a research modeling tool that simulates shallow modelling problem using Java (Ref: http://amt.asu.edu/index.html). He finds his interest in developing web application, investing, and traveling.
Trevor Lamy
Trevor joined iFactor on January 16, 2012 as a Smartphone Developer. He has over 12 years of experience in various parts of the software development industry including self-employment, real-time embedded systems, computer telephony integration, enterprise web applications, and smartphone development. Some of his interests include euro-board games, technology, snowboarding, golf, and spending time with his wife and two children.
Peter Pham
Peter graduated from ASU with Computer Science major and minor math. He joined iFactor in Feb 2012 as software developer at the Phoenix office. He is currently working on street lighting outage. Peter has some experience on developing web services using Visual Basic and .Net framework when he worked for Sandhills Publishing in Scottsdale as system analysis intern. He is now living with family in Gilbert, AZ; he loves to play soccer and draw as well as traveling and cars.
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We Energies has introduced a new online tool for streetlight outage reporting and status updates. The tool, StreetLightOutages.com™ (SLO), was developed and implemented by iFactor Consulting. SLO provides a method for We Energies customers to easily locate streetlights by pole number, address, or general location. Streetlights owned by We Energies are displayed on a Microsoft Bing Maps platform, with each streetlight represented by a green icon. To submit a report, customers simply click on the icon and complete a short outage report. After the form is submitted, the streetlight icon on the map turns red, indicating that there is a known outage for the light and preventing submission of duplicate reports.
