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28 | NOVEMBER 2020 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Event Customer experience and the legacy of lockdown There's no 'new normal' yet for customer behaviours or engagement trends following lockdown-induced transformations on both fronts. The limbo is keeping customer experience leaders in the utilities sector on their toes, Jane Gray reports. T he UK's period of national lockdown for coronavirus this year triggered some major shis in customer behav- iour, creating a surge in usage of digital and self-serve channels, dips in phone traffic and spikes in meter reading submissions. By and large, utilities responded to these changes with agility, sustaining and some- times even improving customer satisfaction levels while shiing contact centres into dis- tributed set-ups with most agents working from home. As the pandemic wears on, how- ever, how are these transformations playing out? And how are they impacting the strat- egies and priorities of customer experience leaders in the sector? These were the fore- most questions for a group of senior industry representatives at a recent Utility Week vir- tual debate, hosted in association with Bold 360 by LogMeIn. Addressing the developing picture for customer contact channel preferences first, the group found a broadly shared experi- ence in continued volatility, with channel volumes failing to settle into clear patterns. While a general upli in digital and self- serve options does seem to be enduring, phone contact levels have picked up again to something approaching pre-lockdown levels, and several participants agreed that there can be significant day-to-day variances in contact channel volumes. The upshot of this lack of predictability is a need for continued agility in contact centre resourcing and a growing consensus around the need for multi-skilled agents who can effectively handle service queries across many different channels as demand requires. In this environment, email correspond- ence has become something of a "problem channel" from a customer experience and efficiency perspective. Enduring upticks of around 20 per cent for email traffic were common to most participants, and while communication over this channel is rela- tively attractive for home-based employees due to its "asynchronous" nature, it can also become labour intensive and expensive to service. Several participants agreed that they have become increasingly aware of effective email correspondence as a high value skill among their agents, and also that they have become increasingly sensitive to the inefficiencies created by staff becoming entangled in long email exchanges with customers which, post-Covid, are tending to involve more com- plicated queries and require several different service elements. Indeed, a generally increasing environ- ment of anxiety for all customers seems to be driving an overall upli in contact. At one energy retailer in particular, this increas- ing demand on the contact centre has been pronounced. "Email is currently up about 20 per cent and chat at a similar level compared with what we would expect," said the CX director. "We're facing quite a tough service challenge because our underlying base is contacting us more, plus we've acquired a lot more cus- tomers recently, so nothing is really settling for us at the moment." Contact centres and customers under pressure Amid all this volatility, however, all our par- ticipants agreed that recent months have seen a steady rise in the number of contacts relating to affordability issues, and there was a very clear expectation that this upward