Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 29TH NOVEMBER - 5TH DECEMBER 2019 | 27 Customers Utility Week's customer engagement series is supported by Content Guru. Q&A Rebecca Dibb-Simkin, Octopus There's a lot of pressure on energy retail pricing – how does that sit with customer service? We pride ourselves on being a fairly priced energy company. We don't always promise to be the cheapest, because o en the cheapest are either unsustainably cheap, which is why we've seen so many smaller suppliers go pop, or you get this 'tease and squeeze pricing', where low prices for new customers are subsi- dised by that hike in prices later on, which is something we've railed against. So we always promise to be one of the cheapest, and we deliver that by our incredible operational e• ciency. Our cost to serve is lower than many of our competitors, so we can keep our prices down. Are there any channels that you don't engage with customers through? Not at all. Sometimes we have people turn up at our o• ces, people • nd us on Google and come and knock on the door, and we'll go and chat with them quite happily. People write letters to us. We don't get many but probably a few hun- dred a year, and that's absolutely • ne. I don't think we've got a fax machine, so you can't fax us, but that's the only channel we don't have. We have all the social media channels. Facebook and Twitter are the big ones. We have an Instagram account, but I don't think we've had any customer service queries through it. We won't discuss an account on the Facebook page. What does success look like? We have a measurement tool called the Customer Happiness Index. It's a pro- prietary measure. I suppose it's our version of Net Promoter Score. A er every interaction a customer has with us, we send them an email asking them to give us a happy face, an indiˆ erent face or a sad face. If they give us a sad face, a little box will pop up and they're asked to share why they aren't happy. Any sad faces or comments are sent directly to the team leader of that customer's team, and the team leader will review those and go back to the customer that same day. More than 70 per cent of people give us a happy face. The feedback is daily and anybody across the business can see it. We've got screens across every o• ce showing the latest index. Although it's a very simple metric, it's a really good way of starting to understand how customers really think and feel. Are you using AI to respond to customers? We don't use AI, because we like customers to be spoken to by human beings. We use data and machine learning and algorithms to understand how people might engage with us at all times, and to be able to make sure that we're ready. Our system holds 30 billion rows of data that we use for every- thing from planning when our calls might come in, to the times of the month we get peak emails. What for you is something that isn't very successful? The smart meter customer experience, because of the chal- lenge there has been with that rollout. There are things that we can learn to do better, and there are things that are out of our control. Where we built our own tech, most stuˆ is within our control, and we can make it better. It's di• cult when you're working with a system that you can'tŽcontrol, even though there are a lot of great people working on it. Rebecca Dibb-Simkin is speaking at Utility Week's Customer Summit on 22 and 23 January 2020 in London. For more details: https://event.utilityweek.co.uk/customer/ you would know that – if you call or email or Facebook message us, we will automatically recognise who you are, and give that to team A to answer, so it's all integrated." Dibb-Simkin explains that customers can also self-serve when amending their own direct debit online, provide meter readings or inform the supplier they're moving house. All interactions, by whatever means, are logged, so there's a record of all customer contact. "There were always questions about whether we could scale this model. But by being very true to our tech roots, and contin- uing to improve our platform and our CRM systems all the time, we've shown that we can scale it." She continues: "As we keep growing, we need to continue to get better. That's the big- gest challenge, continuing to put pressure on yourself to keep making things better as you scale." Chief executive Greg Jackson has recently talked about the challenges of integrating the customers it took over from Co-op Energy in August. Speaking at Utility Week Congress in Birmingham in October, Jackson said that a survey of the Co-op customers – who are being migrated to Octopus CRM – indicated that "44 per cent said they will de• nitely stay… so we have to work hard to retain the rest". Dibbs-Simkin appreciates the challenge: "We've now got 1.3 million customers, we're the only Which? recommended energy sup- plier for the second year in a row and our customer happiness index is still above 70Ž per cent. But we all know it's not about resting on your laurels." showing the latest index. Although it's a very simple metric, it's a really good way of starting to understand how customers really think and feel. Are you using AI to respond to customers? We don't use AI, because we like customers to be spoken to by human beings. We use data and machine learning and algorithms to understand how people might engage with us at all times, and to be able to make sure that we're ready. Our system holds 30 billion rows of data that we use for every- thing from planning when our calls might come in, to the times of the month we get peak emails. What for you is something that isn't very successful? The smart meter customer experience, because of the chal- lenge there has been with that rollout. There are things that we can learn to do better, and there are things that are out of our control. Where we built our own tech, most stuˆ is within our control, and we can make it better. It's di• cult when you're working with a system that you can'tŽcontrol, even though there are a lot of great people working on it. Rebecca Dibb-Simkin is speaking at Utility Week's Customer Summit on 22 and 23 January 2020 in London. For more details: https://event.utilityweek.co.uk/customer/

• Cover