Snohomish County PUD powers a seamless outage experience with address validation

Snohomish County Public Utility District (PUD) is Washington state's second-largest publicly owned utility, serving over 380,000 electricity customers and an additional 24,000 water customers across Snohomish County and Camano Island. With a commitment to providing reliable service, their mission is grounded in sustainability, transparency, and customer satisfaction.

The PUD relies on smart digital tools to streamline operations, reduce customer friction, and maintain and repair critical infrastructure during outages.

The PUD serves a large geographic area, encompassing a diverse range of communities and landscapes. During major storm events and unplanned outages, one of the PUD’s main goals is to ensure that customers can easily report an issue and stay informed without flooding the PUD’s Customer Service call center.

But there was a significant problem: customer addresses weren’t standardized. Because the PUD's customer address software doesn't enforce consistent formatting at the point of entry, addresses could be entered in a variety of ways (think “St.” vs. “Street” or cities vs. unincorporated neighborhoods).

These address variations made it nearly impossible to match a customer-entered address with their records when submitting an outage report.

Used both online and through the PUD’s IVR (interactive voice response) phone system, implementing real-time address validation not only improves accessibility, but it also significantly reduces manual work for customer service. Developer Jeremy Babcock led the technical implementation of Smarty and reported smooth sailing.

Instead of trying to retrofit their internal SAP data into a new format - a challenging task for any public utility - the team decided to implement Smarty’s US Address Verification API on both ends of the matching process.

Here’s how it works:

This streamlined process means that “customers can now report an outage in three, maybe four clicks, without frustration. That reduces our call volume significantly, especially during major events,” says Bruss.

While the PUD doesn’t have a before-and-after dataset (this was a new project), they knew right away that address standardization was making a difference.

With accurate matching:

And the ROI? They realized it by the first storm.

Initially, the PUD used Smarty primarily for address standardization and customer matching in outage reporting. However, they soon realized that it also increased internal awareness about data quality issues. This newfound awareness helped underscore the importance of consistent data management and ignited interest in future integrations. The cost-effectiveness of Smarty's solution was evident, proving its value for the project’s budget right from the start.