EDITORIAL: Smart meters must come with staff culture change

Opinion and Analysis

Kenya Power workers in Nyali, Mombasa. PHOTO | FILE 

By Business Daily

If Kenya Power implements plans to install what it is calling smart meters for its customers, then the company will have potentially made a major leap towards improving interactions with its customers while also sealing a major avenue for revenue leakage.

Kenya Power says that it will be in a position to disconnect customers who will have fallen behind in payment of their monthly bills at the touch of a button once the new meters are installed.

The electricity distribution company will also send out notices of anticipated power disruptions to users, who will read them on their meter screens.

Instead of sending meter readers to every customer to record their usage units at the end of the month, the smart meters will automatically send the information to Kenya Power, which will send back individual customer bills for display on the smart meters’ screens.

As it is now, a majority of the electricity company’s 2.9 million customers have a hard time accessing the firm’s customer care representatives.

Whenever there is disruption in power supply, emergencies such as fires or even just routine inquiries, customers are made to queue on automatic answering machines for minutes before reporting their complaints.

In cases of disputed billing, customers do not readily have records of their power usage, making it hard for them to tell whether they are being over-charged by the utility firm.

The smart meters, Kenya Power says, have the potential to eliminate this problem by storing records of each customer’s usage.

Perhaps most important for the power firm, the meters can detect and send information on any tampering with the power connection, which could help the company save millions of shillings lost through leakages due to illegal tapping of electricity.

But like any other automated system, its operation, integrity and benefits to both customers and the company entirely depend on the integrity of staff employed to manage it.

If Kenya Power changes the meters but does not train its employees on a new culture of customer care, then its efforts may not bear the desired outcome.

The smart meters could as well capture the customer complaints of outages and the like, but it is still the technical staff who will be expected to attend to the affected clients.

Given that the company is spending a lot of cash on this system, then it would only make sense to train staff on the required culture change.