Utility Week

28 | JANUARY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Customers Event with somebody quickly. It's very similar with debt: if you've got a real problem, you're more inclined to speak with a human being. "You can have all kinds of omni-channels but quite o•en speaking to a human being is the most important thing for customers who are having a really difficult time." Certainly, boosting the skills of those on-hand to help seemed to be a common response. One energy company described how it had set up a specialist support team, which brought together financial and afford- ability activities along with broader prior- ity schemes, to make sure customers could access all of its services. Another participant had not only put in place more training for staff but had also increased its webchat capabilities to deal with closed call centres and people were working from home. The point was also made that the changed working arrangement with staff working from home has made it possible to introduce shi• working, so that customer conversations can take place out- side of traditional 9 to 5 operations. "We use the apps and we use SMS. We keep nudging people to use the most cost- effective method of payment. And one thing we've found during Covid is that the email traffic rose the most," explained the same participant. "You have to adapt your communication styles to suit your customers. That's the key – we really must get that right," he added. There are problems with customer data It was apparent from the discussion that util- ities are trying to resource customer chan- nels to deal proactively with the fallout of the pandemic, but it was acknowledged that their Achilles Heel is the lack of customer data to enable them to segment and pro- file customers and be proactive in offering help. Work collating data in this way ended up being, as one participant put it, "quite a manual process for our back-office staff ". "Data quality is a major problem, as is data in different places and not connected," added another participant. "I think everyone struggles with data problems. I'd be reluctant to classify on our system that a customer is vulnerable – that presents all sorts of prob- lems and I think it would help if we could connect better with government and other organisations." Regulators had set out plans for water and energy companies to start sharing infor- mation about those on the Priority Services Register this spring, but that was put back because of the complexities of the GDPR and legal issues. Others expressed similar frustrations: "We don't have all the customer data in the right place – and it makes the job just that bit harder. Our biggest challenge in water is there's nothing to compel anybody to tell us they're taking a service from us. We don't know who's in a property. "But we've been doing a lot to under- stand what's in our system and to establish if there is a high level of turnover in a property because that indicates transiency, and that can be a sign of vulnerability, and that we're more likely to get a debt on that account." The need to reduce costs to serve A constant challenge for all of our par- ticipants is pressure to reduce cost to serve while at the same time boosting customer service. It was agreed that bringing down cost to serve had to come from automating straightforward interactions, rather than under-servicing the vulnerable. "When dealing with your most vulnerable custom- ers, there's no cheap way of doing that. It's what I call shoe leather – you actually need to be out there, working with third parties. Because whatever we say, our customers will be suspicious of us and our motivations as we're a big organisation," observed one participant. She added: "We have to make the rest of the business really efficient to pay for this, which means we need to automate more and more in other areas." Utilities are embracing social media, two- way texts, and chatbots for more straight- forward customer communication and engagement. One participant described a recent busi- ness transformation: "Rather than doing what we used to do, which was sending out very expensive letters for everything we did and then converting that letter into emails, we've turned that off. And we've gone through a process of identifying what the communication is there to do. Is it for com- munication only? Is there a call for action within it? Is it just a notification? And that way, we've worked out a better cost-to-serve journey. "So to contact a customer to say there's a meter read at 9am, you can do that by SMS, rather than phone. It's very cheap, easy to mass produce, and customers are happy to accept it." In terms of using live webchat, partici- pants reported that with respect to serving customers well, it worked best if custom- ers were asked to fill in basic information like name, address, account number, which allowed an agent to deal with three live chat conversations concurrently – "And really answer the questions and not have those big gaps in conversation." continued from previous page Customer Communications Management can send the right messages Tracking and managing customer communi- cations in centralised systems has become essential as utility firms move to omni- channel engagement described by partici- pants taking part in the roundtable. "A Customer Communications Man- agement (CCM) solution that provides a single source of the truth, yet enables true omni-channel communications management across print, email, SMS and web pages is absolutely key to the overall experience of both employees and customers alike," said one attendee.

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