If you’re a SSEN customer and experiencing a power cut, chances are Cheryl Ross will be dispatching the engineer to solve the issue and get your lights back on.
And with the majority of the country needing to stay home to keep us all safe, during the coronavirus outbreak, restoring power quickly has never been more vital.
Cheryl is just one of the critical power workers needed to keep Britain going during the pandemic.
As soon as a customer alerts our contact centre of an issue with their power, Cheryl gets the right engineers to the area to start the process of getting the lights back on as safely and as quickly as possible.
She said: “Power cuts happen less frequently that they ever did but when they do happen, we want to get the issue sorted as fast as possible. We need to get the field engineers to where the issue is, so I need to find the closest crew and get the information to them. I’ll be checking in on them for updates as to how the job is going, when they might finish, where they are and scheduling them onto the next one.
“I’m in constant contact with our Control Room to make sure they’re aware of any damage to the network or other situations which need to be resolved for everyone’s safety.
“Our whole team is normally based in the Customer Contact Centre, but to limit the number of critical workers coming into contact with each other, we’ve now split across two separate parts of the site to keep our distance.”
Key workers across many different industries are doing a sterling job, often under difficult circumstances, as they work to deliver for wider society.
Cheryl said: “COVID-19 has made a massive difference to all of our daily lives, no matter what we do or where we live, and everyone is focussed on doing all they can to keep themselves safe. In our case doing that helps be able to keep serving our customers.
“It’s a worrying time but electricity is essential to helping people stay home and stay safe as well as supporting the wider efforts so I’m proud to be playing my small part.”