Episode 248: The lights are back on. So why are customers still angry? At Dominion Energy, engineers once believed their job ended when electricity was restored. But as outages grew more visible and customers grew more vocal, Utibe Bassey, Dominion’s vice president of customer experience, began to challenge that assumption. Knowing how to fix the grid, she argues, isn’t enough if customers never understand why it failed or when it’ll come back.

Utibe grew up in Nigeria, where power outages were a daily reality. To help Dominion’s engineers understand more viscerally and emotionally what that feels like, she shares photos of surgeries lit by candles and students studying by kerosene lamps. Her message: Reliability is human. Power is personal.

To change behavior, she turns to data. With NPS Prism, Utibe gives each team a clear view into how customers perceive the company’s performance. It helps them understand how perception lags behind technical fixes. Outage after outage, her teams are learning that telling customers why the lights went out can matter more than how fast they come back on. With that data, technical teams don’t just ask, “Did we fix it?” They ask, “How did it feel for the customer?”

Learn how audit and compliance teams frame decisions in customer terms, how outage estimates prioritize updates over accuracy, and how CX team members can rotate into operations—and vice versa—to embed empathy into processes.

Guest: Utibe Bassey, Vice President of Customer Experience, Dominion Energy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Key Topics Covered:

• Why engineers need to explain outages, not just fix them
• The cultural disconnect between the mission and the customer mindset
• Using the power of highly memorable photos to bridge emotional understanding
• How precise answers compare to more empathetic ones
• Journey orientation and shared CX goals
• Perception compared to reality and confronting ETR skepticism
• How NPS Prism drives internal change
• Planned outages as a culture lab
• From door-knocking to All in Service Week
• An overview of CX in incentive plans

Notable Quotes:

 [6:00] “We have a term that we say, ‘all in service,’ because we're all in service of the customer. We want people, whether they're frontline facing or they're in audit, supply chain, or ethics, to connect the dots between, ‘Hey, if you don't do the thing you do well, even if it's three or four steps removed, it impacts how customers see our company.’”

[6:00]  “Customer service is a huge component of CX, but it's not CX. We say to our colleagues, customer service/customer experience is the sum of all the interactions an individual has with a brand.”

[11:00]  “When I joined Dominion, I told one of the folks on our team that success for us is not the same as success for a team, let's say, that's launching an app. Success for us is going to be found in very small changes in people's thinking.”

[13:00] “The main thing our team tries to keep front and center for all of our stakeholders is that we need a shared outcome.”

[32:00]  “When you have an organization whose colleagues think about the customer in a way that connects themselves to the customer, even personally, this stuff is like wildfire.”

Additional Resources:

• Bain & Company’s Case Study with Dominion Energy: How a National Leader Turned CX Ideas into Action with NPS Prism