My Journey to Building the App I Knew Utilities Needed — Part 3: Why the Squeaky Wheel Keeps Winning
In Utilities, being loud pays.
If you’re the one complaining the most, chances are, your issue jumps to the front of the queue. That executive sponsor with the urgent escalation? Fast-tracked. The regulator raising eyebrows? All hands on deck.
But what happens to all the small and silent failures no one’s yelling about? The ones that quietly chip away at revenue, customer trust, and operational efficiency?
They wait. Or worse — go unnoticed till they, inevitably, become the next crisis.
The Cost of Constant Firefighting
By the time we started designing the Celonis for Utilities - Smart Billing App, I was already pretty familiar with the pattern. I’d seen how the same issues got “fixed” again and again. Same firefight. Same panic. Same patch job.
Because in utilities, most leadership energy is spent reacting to noise — not responding data. You don’t get ahead of problems. You get pulled into whichever one is currently screaming the loudest.
The Culture of Escalation
This isn’t just a leadership problem — it’s systemic and it’s deeply cultural.
Teams learn that fixes only happen when something becomes a crisis. Escalations become the only way to get things moving. And pretty soon, all the incentives are reversed:
The people who keep things running quietly get ignored.
The teams who raise hell get the resources.
And the problems that don’t escalate? They just keep festering.
We’re not solving for process. We’re solving for decibel reduction.
We Didn’t Just Build It to Chase the Loud Stuff
Of course the app helps with the obvious problems — the ones that land in the CEO’s inbox and get everyone scrambling. That’s table stakes.
But we wanted more than just a better way to handle the noise.
We wanted to expose what wasn’t getting airtime. The billing failures that never escalate. The repeat patterns that don’t look like a pattern until you zoom out. The slow leaks that don’t yell — but add up.
Things like:
Meter Readers who are consistently below their performance goals
Repeated truck rolls to the same customer premise to read a meter
Bill Cycles that are constantly failing the SLAs
New Customers that have gone unbilled for months
We didn’t want to wait for noise. We wanted the data to squeak.
From Reactive to Responsive
Most executives want to act early and decisively. The challenge is visibility. But they’re trapped in an escalation-driven operating model.
Without the app, many of these indicators would stay buried — only surfacing as lagging metrics during a monthly MER, when options are limited and accountability is diffuse.
With the app, frontline supervisors walk into weekly huddles already focused. They know where attention is needed today, based on operational signals — not anecdotes.
And leadership is no longer flying blind.
They’re watching process performance in near real-time, able to course-correct early — before the business feels the impact.
That’s the shift: from reactive firefighting to responsive operations that are resilient.
Next Up in Part 4…
We’ll zoom out and show how we stitched this all into an Executive Metrics view — because this only works if leadership has a line of sight into where the real problems are hiding. And more importantly, where they’re headed next.
