Utility Week

26 | 11TH - 17TH OCTOBER 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Customer Engagement Insight report Are chatbots the answer? Live chat is an increasingly popular engagement chan- nel, according Shell Energy's Andy Eadle, because it ena- bles customers to multi-task. "You can be live chatting with us while you're cooking tea at home. That's much more difficult if you're on the phone," he says. "We have a chatbot on the website, but if the chatbot gives an answer, it's really clear that it's an automated answer, and it's just one click if you then want a different response from a human being. "When we're imparting knowledge to a customer, if they've got an enquiry about their contract ending or payment amount or date, chatbots are great for that because they're there 24/7. "But as you get into more complex issues, or a set of questions that a customer might have, then quite oˆen putting a person in front of that customer, and mak- ing that clear, is the most efficient and effective way of doing it. "If you can convert a customer, through customer choice, to a channel that they would rather interact on, that customer will happily stay in that channel. I think the problems arise when channels are offered that are not as effective for the customer, because then a cus- tomer will be using two channels, which of course is more expensive." Hilary Bennett at Severn Trent, says that the cost to serve has not been pushed up by an omni-channel approach: "It will have reduced our cost to serve. To give you an example, our webchat agents can handle concur- rent chats, as opposed to one at a time as they would with a phone call." Achieving efficiencies means that it's essential that operations can be scaled up or down and that staff have multiple skills to be able to deal with queries in different ways. That said, some utility firms still prefer for staff to specialise – and be in a position to move across if needs require. UK Power Networks can scale up customer engage- ment operations, harnessing support departments such as HR to deal with incidents like lightning strikes. "You might get 2,500 customer contacts on an average day – there would be four or five times that volume in a lightning incident," says Sam Fuller, head of customer service with the company. As well as choice, immediacy is another prerequisite for utilities in terms of customer engagement. Fuller says the network's response time on social media is under four minutes. "We've also developed proactive searches so we can find people – who may be tweeting about something that we can resolve for them, but they don't use our hashtag, name or twitter handle." He says that the key to a successful omni-channel offering is not to introduce new channels and solutions until its ready and working perfectly. "We have put in place a panel of 500 customers who help us develop new solutions and we wouldn't roll something new out if we didn't score nine out of ten." It's more than a digital experience. "There's a big cultural shiˆ in utilities from customer service to customer experience," says Bristol Water's Newby, reflecting Ofwat's direction of travel. "We're mak- ing sure that we understand every interaction, both posi- tive and negative, in order to manage it as best we can. "Utilities tend not to interact with their customers that oˆen. If you're a water customer, it's quite possible that you'll never interact with us, although you will do inadvertently. Roadworks are a good example. Now, we would try and put a message up, telling people how long it's going to be there for, what it's about, which makes it a bit better. "We can also pre-warn them, they could go to our website and find out where we're planning works. All of these little interactions build up the brand in the custom- er's mind. If you build that brand, then you build loyalty. And then if something does go wrong, people are more sympathetic." As utility firms strive to well-regarded pillars of local communities as well as excellent service provid- ers, Newby points to a key piece of the jigsaw that can be overlooked. "It's about having a customer culture. If you don't have a good customer culture, you could put in loads of great tech and possibly even get some efficien- cies, but you wouldn't get customer satisfaction." n "If you can convert a customer, through customer choice, to a channel that they would rather interact on, that customer will happily stay in that channel." ANDY EADLE, DIRECTOR OF CUSTOMER SERVICE, SHELL ENERGY

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