Storm Center’s Customer Experience Boosted with Radar Layer Improvements

Whether it’s heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, or blizzards, there are very few regions that haven’t been on the receiving end of a sucker-punch from Mother Nature in the past few years. It’s this extreme weather that is reinforcing the importance of accurate information during weather emergencies. And also, just how much utility customers rely on outage maps to understand outages and receive restoration updates.

Better Data Means a Better Experience

Gaining a better understanding of current weather conditions, what’s potentially rolling in, and how power infrastructure or restoration times may be impacted allows customers to prepare for what’s ahead. Of course, this is only possible when they have access to accurate, reliable information. Recognizing the integral role that we play in providing that information to utilities, we decided to partner with a new weather provider, Xweather, for the Storm Center™ radar layer. This change is part of our ongoing efforts to provide the best possible user experience to our utility clients and their customers. The change will not impact existing functionality for our Storm Center customers but will add new features like global map coverage.

Capabilities and Benefits of the Xweather Radar Layer

• Global coverage: Our previous weather provider only covered the U.S. and southern Canada, but the Xweather radar layer covers the entire world. Now we have access to data from radar stations in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The radar data for the rest of the world is generated from satellite images. This extended coverage allows KUBRA to provide radar data to our clients and their customers in the northern parts of Canada as well as other regions in the world. 

• Easier to understand: The legend and color palette used to present the radar data follows a much more modern approach and makes it easier to understand current conditions.

• ‍Same functionality: Other than the appearance of the legend and the enhanced coverage, the weather feature will not change current functionality.
• Reputation for reliability: The reliability of Xweather services is evident by the large number of companies that count on the accuracy of the weather conditions for their operations, including Trane Technologies, Trimble, Genesis, HelloFresh, Abyssal, and REVER.

Looking Forward

As we look to the future, we will continue to view any changes to Storm Center through the customer experience lens, assessing what additions and modifications will enhance customer experience and improve satisfaction for utilities and their customers.

Learn more about how Storm Center can improve your customer experience by providing near real-time weather data and outage information to your customers in their channel of choice.