Utility Week

24 | 11TH - 17TH OCTOBER 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Customer Engagement Insight report Excellence in service is about communicating with customers using their preferred channel - not yours. Denise Chevin reports. Channel hopping O ne word dominates the watchlist of every util- ity successfully navigating modern day customer engagement: choice. Not that long ago customer engagement meant letters or contact centres, with call- ers at best having to negotiate a maze of menu options to reach the right department to sort out a bill, deal with a change of address, or report a leak or outage. Today's gold standard is all about giving custom- ers the freedom to engage with their water providers, retailer or network operator how they wish, and flip seamlessly between an ever-growing number of chan- nels across social media, web and phone, and if there is a problem be proactive in alerting customers. Today's utility is under more pressure from regulators to get it spot on when it comes to customer experience, but they also need to keep bills down. This means they have to quickly learn the knack of servicing customer engage- ment through an avenue of their customers' choice and do so as cost effectively and efficiently as possible. "Whereas we would have been opening white mail and answering calls five years ago, now we're now seeing webchat and self-serve and Twitter and Facebook, Insta- gram and virtual assistants; they're a real part of how the utility operates," says Hilary Bennett head of customer contact at Severn Trent. Like others at the top of their game, she says offering choice has to be accompanied by consistency in services, and that means having the visibility of contact history of every customer available to every agent. In turn, that creates efficiency and customer satisfaction because it allows engagements to be resolved without the callers having to return through a different channel. "A contact centre in the past would have been all about people jumping from one channel to another and the poor agent not having any visibility. Now everybody is striving for that single view of the customer, so that you're always having a meaningful conversation. "We're focusing on how we can serve our customers better, in a way that they want. So if you went on the website today and did something on self-serve, and you dropped into a contact centre because you had some- thing else you wanted to do on a different channel, the agent is able to see what you've done on the self-serve. Omni-channel is a seamless experience, so anything you get in one channel is always complemented by the oth- ers," she explains. Networks Ofgem put the pressure on energy network operators to improve their engagement performance, introduc- ing a new customer service incentive for RIIO. The so- called broad measure of customer satisfaction (BMCS) was aimed at replicating the sorts of measures typically used by consumer-facing businesses in a competitive environment. The BMCS incentivises distribution network operators to satisfy customers especially in terms of telling custom- ers about interruptions, carrying out new connections and dealing with complaints. It has certainly seen the networks raise their game. Sixty per cent of Western Power Distribution's engagement, for example, is outbound. This proactive approach, coupled with numerous initiatives to help vulnerable customers engage, has resulted in WPD top- ping the Ofgem's customer engagement league table for eight years in a row. "In addition to around one million "It's about choice and consistency and getting the same level of quality across all channels." CHRIS GRIFFITHS, CONTACT CENTRE MANAGER, WPD

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