By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO hopes to become more customer- and employee-focused in 2019, unveiling plans for a new feedback tool, a data gathering project and a new committee.

The RTO plans to create a Customer Experience Steering Committee next year that will examine customer perceptions of it and explore improvements it can make in interacting with them. It has yet to decide who will sit on the committee.

MISO also said it will create and introduce a “Voice of the Stakeholder” program to gather both customer and employee opinions. Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Todd Hillman said MISO plans this year to begin “journey mapping” — collecting data by following customer requests or comments from submittal to the RTO’s response and eventual outcome. MISO has hired management consulting firm West Monroe Partners to assist on the project.

Hillman said MISO will create a “centralized platform” for capturing feedback from customers and employees to transform itself from a “service provider to a collaborative entity to a trusted RTO adviser and partner.” Speaking during a Sept. 11 conference call of the Corporate Governance and Strategic Planning Committee of the Board of Directors, Hillman said MISO will eventually examine and rank customer- and employee-experience improvements similarly to how it uses the Market Roadmap process to set priorities for market improvements.

MISO Director Mark Johnson asked if stakeholders will really offer ideas using the Voice of the Stakeholder program.

“They’re actually eager to provide the feedback, but the mediums we provide are limited,” Hillman responded. “We need to make this more routine.”

Hillman also said MISO’s current employee feedback tool was put in place in the early 2000s and is now “feeble.”

“There’s nothing more dangerous than asking employees what they think and not being able to act on it,” he added.

Meanwhile, MISO is circulating a survey through Sept. 26 to identify possible improvements on its current customer training process.