Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 11TH - 17TH OCTOBER 2019 | 25 Customers Brought to you in association with inbound calls, we proactively call customers, and send text messages and tweets, if there's been a power cut. We have just over 30,000 followers, giving us a potential reach in excess of two million people," says WPD's con- tact centre manager, Chris Griffiths. "It's about choice and consistency and getting the same level of quality across all channels," he says. Ofwat's 2019 price review (PR19) marks a regulatory step up in this regard, moving water companies from an old service incentive model to a new, more stringent measure called C-MeX (customer measure of experience). C-MeX will force water companies to think more stra- tegically and holistically about customer experience, the role of brands and how they can offer frictionless cus- tomer service through all customer channels. Ben Newby, chief customer officer at Bristol Water, says his organisation is already looking at customer engagement through a wider lens. "There's a big cultural shi" in utilities from customer service to customer expe- rience, that is, making sure we understand every inter- action, both positive and negative, in order to manage it as best we can." Armed with this knowledge, it is about making sure you respond to those individual needs in a personal way. "One customer may need a job done urgently today, while another customer could maybe wait a few days. You need to be able to optimise in order to meet those needs," he says. The name of the game is also about making interac- tions with customers as easy as possible. Newby again: "In the past, we might have asked them for their cus- tomer number and everything. But we can look all that information up through their postcode, rather than ask- ing them for it." Newby explains how at Bristol Water, ten people in the social media team are sat in among contact centre advisers – all giving people exactly the same information – logging into the same system and getting access to the same level of information, and everyone can do everyone else's jobs, he says. Omni-channel can bring efficiencies Utility engagement heads acknowledge that keeping pace with the arrival of new channels is challenging, but it doesn't have to mean that costs automatically rise. "We're led by demand from customers; Facebook is a good example. Taking ourselves to a platform that the consumer chooses has got to be a positive thing. The key is that we measure and track customer feedback through that channel," explains Andy Eadle, director of customer service at Shell Energy. "We make sure that we have the right people and the right level of expertise to make sure if a customer uses a channel, they get proper service in that channel. "This mean that it's not a massive drain on resources, because if a customer chooses to engage through Face- book, say, if we do a good job of that, then they're not engaging us through the phone. "It's really about expertise and training, and our awareness in managing channels, as opposed to needing more resource," he says. n feature article continued overleaf But the phone is still ringing … Utility firms generally have seen phone calls fall away as other media have grown more popular. But the mantra of choice is king means recognising that voice calls will be around for some time. Utility companies can't shunt their customers online just because it might suit them. Says Bristol Water's Ben Newby: "We've got all the normal things you'd expect: email, Twitter, live chat, Facebook, self-ser- vice billing. But we found that although you can do self-service, some journeys are quicker when you talk to someone. "What we try and do is signpost people so that if they're on the website to do a particular thing, it may be easier to ring this num- ber, or we'll ring you, and we can get it done in a couple of min- utes. We found a house moving, for example, could be done more quickly by talking to the customer and was a better experience for them than having to punch numbers on the screen." "As we mature through the digital landscape, self-service will be there, but there will be other journeys that may be better with a personal touch. "Banking, for example, works great as a digital concept, with an app. But if there's water pouring into your building, you don't want to deal with that electronically. You want to speak to some- one, and know that they're going to have someone there as soon as possible." Western Power Distribution's Chris Griffiths, agrees: "I don't see phone calls stopping any time soon. The younger generation prefer texts, WhatsApp and Twitter. But the older generation still prefer to pick up the phone." Martin Taylor, deputy chief executive of Content Guru, which supplies its omni- channel engagement so"ware across a number of industries, concurs: "The human instinct is to want to engage directly, rather than passively observe information. We're still see- ing very high levels of call demand in times of crisis." "Increasingly, you expect to be able to call and speak and be understood, and be able to have a chatbot style experience, but in a voice format. And today's technologies absolutely permit all of that. "The goal is to reduce the amount of repetitive call traffic that human agents have to deal with. You might be a utility with 1,500 call centre agents, all of whom can talk, and in a normal time, someone calls up with a problem, they'll be connected to a human agent. And in many ways, that's the best form of commu- nication if it's available. In this situation, it's about providing the human agent with the information to resolve the issue there and then, quickly and easily. "The other mode is about when it's very busy, and the human agents need to be used sparingly. Your 1,500 agents won't go that far if you've got 800,000 calls that day, as we have seen in real examples." Adds Taylor: "In those instances, they need information quickly that is personalised to their location. So it's still a phone call going through the same route, but we'll ask them to say their postcode, or they'll have a reference number and a property it's associated with, and we'll connect to information systems, so that we have the information about that system, we can convey that immediately, even while the person is waiting in the queue." n

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