Hawaiian Electric connects with customers
by Michael Choe | Oct. 9, 2021
At Hawaiian Electric, we’re dedicated to serving our customers, which includes maintaining regular communication with them. Customer communication has taken on many forms throughout the company’s history. For instance, in the 1930s, the company published the “Modern Menehune” monthly in Honolulu. The newsletter included furniture tips, advertisements for electric appliances, recipes and other news related to the company and electricity.
We’ve continued to keep those lines of communication open with customers through a variety of platforms. Hookui, the company newsletter, provides company news as an insert with the printed electric bill. Our website is regularly updated, and customers can also find a digital version of the newsletter there. Other resources found on the website include the Handbook for Emergency Preparedness, energy-saving toolkits, outage maps, outage reporting and more.
On social media, we take advantage of different channels to broaden our reach. For example, we utilize NextDoor to target specific communities (focusing in on neighborhoods and zip codes) and inform them of any work that may affect them, including pole replacements, aerial inspections and more. Our YouTube channel serves as our video library, housing our video content including aired TV commercials.
One of the platforms where we get a lot of customer engagement is Twitter. Our tweets summarize news in 280 characters or less and typically include links that lead to more information. But perhaps the tweets with the most reach are related to outages. We provide real-time outage updates for major outages throughout our service territory, and customers appreciate that we keep them in the loop.
My personal favorite method of communicating with customers is IGTV, which we use to create short videos on various topics related to electricity that most folks might find interesting. For example, we have videos that include energy-saving tips for specific appliances, guides for The Electric Kitchen recipes, instructions on how to properly dispose of light bulbs and more. Some of the topics have even been inspired by customer feedback. After seeing our energy-saving videos for the oven, microwave oven and washing machine, a customer left a comment saying they’d also like to see us make an episode on the refrigerator. And that’s exactly what we did!
We also offer multiple ways for customers to connect with us as well. They can contact us through our call centers during business hours by phone or chat, send us a message by using the contact form on our website, or chat with us on social media. Communication is key in any good relationship, and that’s what we hope to maintain with our customers.
Michael Choe is a digital communications and social media specialist at Hawaiian Electric Company.
