Learning from the Texas Freeze of 2021 | Communicating with Customers during an Emergency with Marketing Cloud

The Great Texas Freeze of 2021 caused major havoc on the energy infrastructure and left 4.5 million homes without power for days. A major utility company scrambled to communicate with its customers to provide real-time updates and assuage immediate concerns. The company did not have a modern platform for sending ad hoc customer communications; their primary focus for communications had been on transactional notifications such as account billing alerts and customer portal messages which were system-automated.

As a result, they had to rely on manual processes for sending customer and supplier emails which included exporting email addresses from Salesforce and importing them into Marketing Cloud for email sends. The company did not have Salesforce and Marketing Cloud integrated via Marketing Cloud Connect and as a result, were relying on suboptimal processes. It would not be feasible to repeat this process for other immediate communications.

The utility actually saw good engagement and feedback from customers and suppliers who appreciated the increased communications. While the manual process was necessary for this crisis scenario, they wanted to set up proper communications tools and processes to elevate customer engagement as well as enable their teams to quickly and easily execute communications during an emergency scenario.

MRE Consulting implemented leading email marketing practices in Marketing Cloud, and integrated Marketing Cloud and Salesforce. This enabled many benefits for the business team including access to Salesforce contact data in Marketing Cloud for segmentation, visibility into email sends on Contacts in Salesforce, and the ability to leverage Salesforce Reporting capabilities.

MRE worked with the business team to identify audience segments and the data filters the team would need to create those audiences in Marketing Cloud. The client also wanted to leverage key data points from their commodity trading platform (Endur). Since Endur was already integrated to Salesforce, the additional data was easily accommodated.

Contact data quality was a concern, particularly given the importance of some of the account communications. To improve contact hygiene, email validation results and bounced emails from Marketing Cloud were synchronized to Salesforce for sales and service representatives to action. The team created a contact information management page on the existing Community Cloud customer portal. Customers had role-based access which limited which information they could edit for the account, including the ability to change who needed to receive key account communications.

The business team wanted to retain an exact copy of all account-related communications both for regulatory purposes as well as so that service representatives could easily resend emails upon request. MRE built a solution to save an exact copy of the sent email in Salesforce so that any sales or service representative could access it, confirm the information, and also resend the email to them. Marketing Cloud would automatically save email data and the email template to Salesforce.