Utility Week

26 | 29TH NOVEMBER - 5TH DECEMBER 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Case study I t's everyone's job to do customer engagement," says Rebecca Dibb-Sim- kin, marketing and product director at Octopus Energy. "For example, every cus- tomer gets the email address of our chief executive Greg Jackson when they sign up with us. He replies to every email he gets, which is between 40 and 50 a day." "Greg acts as a really good first port of call for anything that's wrong in the business. So, for example, he might say, 'That's a bit strange, I'm getting lots of questions about that', and we'd look into it and see if it's a bug we need to fix." Customer engagement seems to be going well at Octopus: it wins plaudits for its cus- tomer service and is the only energy retailer recommended by Which? for the second year in a row. And although the company has grown rapidly, its chief executive is no busier with direct customer emails. "When I joined the business two and a half years ago, the CEO was getting about 40 emails a day from our 50,000 customers, and now we're at 1.3 million, he still gets about the same amount of emails," says Dibb-Simkin. In August Octopus took over Co-op Energy and its 300,000 customers to propel it over the one million mark. At the heart of Octopus's success is pro- prietary technology that allows the company to respond to new trends and customers' changing demands. So"ware developers sit close to customer teams and any iterations are discussed from a customer perspective. All 250 'energy specialists' – staff in the com- pany whose job is primarily to deal with cus- tomers – are trained to deal with all aspects of customers' accounts and interactions, which results in a 95 per cent 'first fix' rate. "We consider ourselves to be a tech busi- ness that does energy, and we have our own platform and CRM and billing system that we built ourselves," says Dibb-Simkin. "We're constantly improving it as we learn more and more things that we can build into it. So as we get bigger and win more customers, we get more efficient. "We also have a policy where our develop- ers will go and sit with our customer service staff and listen to them talking to customers in order to see if there's anything developers can do to make their lives easier." Another aspect of the winning formula, according to Dibb-Simkin, is that customers are looked a"er by a small team of energy specialists who all sit near each other, which means that a customer will always be looked a"er by the same six to eight people. This gives personalisation and accountability, which is not possible when phoning a large and anonymous call centre. The energy specialists – who make up two-thirds of Octopus's total staff – are spread across offices in London, Leicester, Brighton and the headquarters of the newly acquired Co-op Energy in Warwick. Perhaps reflecting the company's roots as a challenger brand, the majority of customer contact is digital (before taking into account the Co-op Energy customers), which is higher than you might find in the traditional energy suppliers. "About 80 per cent of people email us, or Facebook message or Tweet us, and we answer digital communication from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week," she says. "Some- times out of those hours we have a remote working team of about 40 people who do out-of-hours digital customer service, and one of them works overnight, so you can get emails from us at 2am." But that doesn't mean customers don't have a phone option, she says. "Our open- ing hours on the phone are more limited, because more people email us, so we're open 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, by phone. "We aim to answer the phone within 90 seconds, and that's speaking to a human who will resolve your problem, and we aim to get back to you within a few hours by email, so you'll get stuff resolved the same day. We've found that people do like to email us, because you can fire off an email when it suits you and know that you'll get the answer that day," she says. "We don't measure aver- age call handling times – our team are not told to keep phone calls quick." The same account teams also deal with any messages via social media. "Any customer service messages we get through social media are automatically fil- tered into the correct teams. So if you're a customer looked a"er by team A – not that A tech firm that does energy In the final case study in our customer engagement series, Denise Chevin talks to Octopus's Rebecca Dibb-Simkin about its personalised service, scaling up – and why emojis are so important. "

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