Utility Week

28 | 3RD - 9TH AUGUST 2018 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Utility Week Awards winner case study Customer Care Award Category sponsor: Vision Award winner: Co-op Energy • Title of project/initiative: SoLR for GB Energy Supply • Annual company turnover: £295 million • Number of directly employed staff: 464 Entry criteria: • Quality of entry (clear, evidence based) • Clear, quantifiable goals set for the project that were met or exceeded • Measurable benefits for all custom- ers, or a significant proportion of customers • Measurable benefits for the business • Evidence of going beyond business as usual The Utility Week Awards are held in association with CGI and Capgemini. The 2018 Utility Week Awards have now been launched; see www.utilityweekawards.co.uk/ For sponsorship opportunities please contact Utility Week business develop- ment manager Ben Hammond on benhammond@fav-house.com or 01342 332116 for more information What the judges said... Co-op Energy was a company that bravely took on a high-risk project, providing a retailer of last resort for customers who had nowhere else to turn. O fgem appointed Co-op Energy to be the supplier of last resort for GB Energy, which failed in November 2016. The company's job, therefore, was not only to provide consistency and continuity for GB Energy customers as it transferred them on to its systems, it also needed to significantly improve GB Energy's poor customer services record, among many other things. The objective of the project, from a cus- tomer services point of view, was to com- plete a smooth transition so customers were not inconvenienced by the failure of their supplier. Co-op wanted to go one step fur- ther and vastly improve on the level of ser- vice those customers had been getting. What was the scale of the project? When Ofgem appointed Co-op Energy to take on the customers of the failed GB Energy, the company says its first responsibility was to the 160,000 customers it acquired overnight. However, it adds, it felt it also had a responsibility to all consumers to demon- strate the maturity and reliability of inde- pendent suppliers. The firm was the first of its kind to be appointed through a supplier- of-last-resort (SoLR) process and so the pres- sure was on to prove that it – and others like it – were capable of not just delivering but exceeding expectations. What was the target group? Co-op Energy's target was the 160,000 GB Energy customers who joined it in November 2016. Why this approach? Through the SoLR process, Co-op Energy gained 160,000 GB Energy customers. This increased the company's customer base by more than 67 per cent overnight. As well as maintaining excellent levels of service for those customers, Co-op Energy also had to vastly improve the experience for those customers of GB Energy. This required immediately dealing with a backlog of more than 24,000 emails, 29,000 billing exceptions, 12,500 direct debit excep- tions and more than 1,200 outstanding complaints. What were the project's KPIs? Co-op Energy says the service GB Energy customers were receiving was transformed by its appointment. Within one month of being appointed as the supplier of last resort, the number of customers awaiting reply had reduced from 24,000 to fewer than 900. The company had started with 1,200 unresolved complaints and ended the first month with just over 200. In six months, it had taken nearly 30,000 billing exceptions, almost a third of which were more than two billing periods old, and Picking up the pieces Co-op Energy won plaudits – and a Utility Week Customer Care Award – for the success with which it took on the domestic customers of failed supplier GB Energy in 2016. Co-op Energy on awards night

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