Client Spotlight: Scottsboro Electric Power Board

Q&A with SEPB

1. Who is SEPB? Scottsboro Electric Power Board has been the electric power provider for the residents of Scottsboro, Alabama, since 1939. In 1998, we added telecommunications services to our offerings and today offer Electric, Cable TV, High-Speed Internet and Telephone services to our residential and business customers. All of our employees are residents of Scottsboro, ergo our tagline “Neighbors Serving Neighbors”.
2. What is the importance of weather in your community? Because of the nature of the electric utility business, weather is at the top of our list of priorities. We live in an area that has frequent severe storms and tornadoes along with occasional severe winter weather situations. Being able to stay abreast of weather systems that are headed our way is essential to not only keeping the power on as much as reasonably possible but also, and most importantly, keeping our employees out of harm’s way. We pride ourselves in keeping the electric and telecommunications systems on but no service is more important than the safety of our employees.
3. What challenges were you facing before finding WeatherPlay? Since 1998, we have had a dedicated 24-hour Cable TV channel with a local radio station’s audio and some sort of weather map available to our cable customers. Our most recent vendor ceased operations at the end of 2018 so a replacement had to be found. Over the years, many of our customers have grown to rely on this weather channel so we knew that not just anything would do. Several local restaurants and even our county Emergency Management Agency keep a television tuned to this channel – that’s how important it is to our community. We evaluated a few different products before ultimately choosing WeatherPlay as our long-term replacement system.
4. What was it about WeatherPlay that made you decide to proceed with the product vs. the competition? A couple of aspects of WeatherPlay made the decision relatively easy for us. First, the WeatherPlay team was able to very closely replicate the display from our previous system, helping ensure a smooth transition for our customers. We were afraid that a drastic change would not be welcomed so keeping things similar was very important to us. Secondly, the graphical quality of the WeatherPlay system was hands-down the best we evaluated. Being able to offer a High Definition version of our local weather channel is also something that we found extremely valuable.