Utility Week

36 | APRIL 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence Analysis We must harness the can-do spirit The latest Insight Report from Utility Week and Verint discusses how the innovative spirit spurred by the pandemic will continue influencing customer engagement strategies in years to come. W hen the first cases of Covid-19 appeared in the UK in January 2020, few would have predicted the scale of the crisis that followed. By mid-March, the country had locked down and utilities were scrambling to support customer-facing personnel in working from home. The scope of this reorientation, and other subsequent customer-focused initiatives, and the pace at which they were delivered, has changed customer services culture within utilities for good. At Ovo, contact centre staff were re-ori- ented to work from home with eye-watering speed. "Within the first week of lockdown we had 84 per cent of agents working from home," says Ben Blake, chief executive, Ovo Energy and Smart Home. Blake joined the energy business in November 2020, transfer- ring from the Covid-wrecked travel sector, where he had been senior vice president and general manager at Expedia Group, leading the Hotels.com brand. "This is far better than we managed in travel. It was a bit traumatic for agents, but even more so for technology teams who had to sort all the equipment and authentica- tions. Particularly with some of the legacy systems at SSE, they were solving a lot of problems with how to get on to those from outside the network," Blake says. EDF Energy benefited from having invested in a new cloud-based platform in 2019. The project turned out to have been timely. "We were fortunate in having just moved all our customer-facing telephony to a new cloud-hosted platform. We introduced it at the back end of 2019 and it was just bed- ding in. This effectively meant that we could allow all our customer service advisers to work from home within five days," says Niels Roberts, digital, automation and process excellence director at EDF. "Staff went home, and with some moderation and adjustment, were able to log in over their home wi-fi and take customer calls. It was a huge benefit for us," he says. Channel switching The astonishing pace with which service agents adjusted to remote working was par- alleled by a similarly fast move by many cus- tomers on to digital channels. "We had just launched a new mobile app. We've seen more than a million devices download it since the start of the pandemic," says Roberts. The proportion of EDF custom- ers using its app has risen from 18 to 37 per cent. The supplier expedited plans for addi- tional customer service bots too, including to take pressure off frontline agents while the teams adjusted to home working. "We've made extensive use of automation over the past two years. That automated platform of virtual workers – bots – was used to take on lower value tasks and free up people so that they could answer calls from customers," Roberts says. With customer engagement strategies pivoting quickly in response to fast-changing customer attitudes and behaviours, cloud- based systems emerged as offering the high- est degree of flexibility. "Legacy customer engagement platforms aren't geared to respond with agility. On- premises environments are typically lay- ered in complexity, taking time, money and resources to adapt. A cloud-powered infra- structure lets you adapt quickly to changing business circumstances, and to launch new customer and employee initiatives in days, not months," says Simon Rudkin, vice presi- dent of cloud and hosting at cloud special- ists Verint. Scottish Power's volume of web chats doubled from its average of 20,000 a week, and the number of incoming emails grew by the same percentage as a result of the crisis. Andrew Ward, chief executive, UK Retail at Scottish Power, says: "Customers can con- tact us through web chat, email, text and telephone. We made sure all channels were immediately available, with the exception of telephone, for the broader customer group. We increased capacity around digital chan- nels because it was easier for people to work from home using email and web chat." Similarly, EDF prioritised answering the phone to customers who were most in need, at the start of the pandemic. "Those who were vulnerable, at risk of losing supply or worried about their ability to pay were our focus for calls. We prompted other customers to engage with us on digital channels – a lot did that and the behaviour has continued. A£er the initial peak, we reopened all chan- nels for all customer types. But we have seen pervasive use of digital," says Roberts. Hunger for web chat Ovo was among those suppliers whose planned, cautious steps to adopt more digi- tal services were hastened by the crisis. "Web chat was planned for last year, but we pulled it forward to May. People were contacting us more, call centres were bus- ier and agents' productivity was naturally impacted by working from home. So the web chat feature became very important for cus- tomers who wanted to contact us but didn't want to wait on the phone," Blake says. Ovo reached 10 per cent of customer contacts coming through web chat in the space of ten months. "The speed with which we adopted that was very powerful. At Hotels.com, it took us four years to get to 8 per cent. People were stuck at home in lockdown, engaging with shopping online, and life became a more digitised. Ovo took

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