Utility Week - authoritative, impartial and essential reading for senior people within utilities, regulators and government
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/414726
UtILItY WeeK | 14th - 20th November 2014 | 27 Customers Market view O vo Energy was founded with a sin- gular and simple idea in mind: if an energy company was to be built from the ground up around what was best for the customer, what would it look like? This idea that an energy company should be designed and run with the customer in mind has been the foundation upon which Ovo's growth has been built, and it underpins our values that as a company we treat people fairly, offer competitively priced products, and are transparent and simple to understand. We have not lost sight of this vision, even though our customer base has increased by 280 per cent since the beginning of 2014. Our customers remain our number one pri- ority and we are proud of the feedback we get. MoneySavingExpert.com recently rec- ognised us as the number one energy com- pany when it comes to customer service, and we were also placed first for overall satisfac- tion in Energy Helpline's customer satisfac- tion awards. Technology and innovation are key strings to our bow – we think of ourselves as a retailer first, tech business second and energy supplier third. We do not want to be a no-frills energy provider, we want customers to enjoy their interaction with us. We understand how important it is to develop top technologies that will enable us to better connect with all of our customers and ensure that we continue to stay ahead of the curve and lead the way when it comes to customer service. We believe the decline in switching rates (down 50 per cent since 2008) in the industry is because customers are disengaged from the market and do not trust energy providers aer year-on-year price rises, bad press and poor customer service. What we want to do is re-engage with the market and build trust in our customers. When searching for the best way to engage with our customers, we measured the top ten reasons our customers call us and we have made sure that our customers can do all of those ten things online. By doing this we reduced our customers' propensity to call us. It is about operating efficiently while empowering customers. However, if our customers interact with us less, when they do actually need to call us we must be truly brilliant and wow them if we want to keep them as advocates or get them on their way to becoming one. This is where our use of Rant and Rave comes in. It is an online system we co-devel- oped with the team to give us real-time feed- back on how we are performing. I'd go as far to say that it has revolutionised the way we deliver our service at Ovo and it boosts employee engagement too. Each call and email we deal with is instantly scored out of ten by our custom- ers. This means when we score high, we can reward our advisers for a fantastic job well done but, more importantly, when we score low, it means we can work hard – and quickly – to turn that negative into a posi- tive. It is real time, which means you capture how your customer is truly feeling – it allows our engagement to be based on emotion, which is extremely powerful. We endeavour to make any business decision as though our customers were in the room with us and think it is vital to our success. If they would not like what we are considering, we don't do it. Rant and Rave puts the customer in the room by crunching the data, utilising gamification and presenting it to the team in a creative and engaging way. Customer service agents can upload their own avatars and keep track of their feedback and vital scores so they are kept informed about their performance. Having feed- back so readily available instills a sense of healthy competition among agents, gamifying the process to achieve the best results possible. The ability to combine all of our live feed- back, unite every aspect of the customer journey and then measure this against other quality measures such as our net promoter score has given us unparalleled insight into our customer service levels and has cre- ated an altogether more streamlined and effi- cient strategy. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the impact of Rant and Rave has been obvious. For example, we found that a num- ber of customers were frustrated by the time it took to receive a response to their emails. We therefore dedicated more resources to improve these response times, which led to a direct increase in our email customer satis- faction score in just two weeks. We believe Rant and Rave has also con- tributed to a reduction in our customer churn rate, which is of huge importance to us because we value our customers' support. It has been great to see that across both SMS and email, the response rate of our custom- ers since Rant and Rave became involved has increased by almost 50 per cent, and it is a nice endorsement that those who mat- ter most, our customers, appreciate that we have gone the extra mile. What is more, we have seen a significant reduction in customer complaints since implementation, which we are proud of especially in light of our rapidly increasing customer base. Today's tech-savvy customers exist in a diverse, global marketplace and have much higher expectations of service and reli- ability than before. Thinking like a retailer, rather than a utility, helps Ovo guide behav- iour in the right direction and investing in customer service is our top focus. We make sure the rules of engagement are part of our lifeblood and we always try to think like a customer. We use technology to our advantage and innovate wherever we can. Our business intelligence team is currently developing algorithms that will let us overlay Rant and Rave scores with our customer psychomet- rics, for example. We are also developing new ways to surprise and delight our cus- tomers with random acts of kindness. But all of this effort to engage custom- ers is wasted if you are not already in the business of creating and maintaining trust. Building any company fit for the future depends on that. Justin Haines, customer services director, Ovo Energy Think more like a retailer Energy suppliers should behave more like retailers, and less like utilities, says Justin Haines, and consider the impact on the customer of every decision they make.