Case Study
Utilities
An electricity utility company sets its eyes on modernising its customer service operations, prizing customer experience as a key pillar to its continued growth. The team reviews and transforms its front-end operations to improve workforce productivity, and customer retention.
Customer Experience Design
Call Centre Management
Channel Engagement
The retail business unit of an electricity utility company is looking into opportunities to improve its customer service operations. Each year, a third of customer queries coming through the call centre and support email—roughly 20,000— received no follow-up, largely because of weak management tools and processes. This resulted in high number of complaints, and increasing customer churn rate. Within the 150+ support staff group, managers are also struggling with high staff turnover and poor performance. It is estimated that millions of dollars are possibly lost in the form of lost revenue. The business has recently approved funding to transform its call management system with cloud technologies to cope with the high volume of calls and queries through online channels. Genova Digital was engaged to review its customer service operations and channel engagement practices.
"We had many interesting discussions during the workshop with Genova Digital. In this day and age, we have unprecedented technologies to aid us in achieving greater economies of scale, allowing us to attend to more queries daily. However, the human element—how we say what we say—is often neglected. We will need to excel in both areas to provide a greater customer service experience for our customers."
We first obtained a realistic view of the current customer service operations (CSO) maturity. To do that, we first worked to review their operational flows, and chosen performance indicators within the contact centre team. We also interviewed personnel at all levels within the team to gather anecdotal evidence of the current sentiments of how the team is performing. One key insight was that though the company had two channel selections available i.e. phone calls and emails, most customers resorted to email instead due to high call waiting time, roughly 30 minutes on average. The missed calls were not recognised as the first touchpoint but upon an email was received by the customer service agents. It was on hindsight, that it became obvious to the team why the enquirers were annoyed. This also disputed their high reported FCR rate as inaccurate to represent the actual effectiveness of the customer service team.
We also worked with the team to initiate analyses into the type of queries asked by customers, when they were asked along the customer journey, and how they should be resolved. From these analyses, we built an automated self-help contact centre to replace current channels to help people resolve some of the most common issues without human intervention. There is also an option for customers to speak with a real person whenever a tricky customer situation renders its necessity.
To instil continual improvement in its channel engagement practices, we trained the customer service leads on issue taxonomy, performance metrics, and experience engineering to improve the service experience of their customers. These service leads then go on to institute recurring, structured coaching sessions to help their individual team members pinpoint and address what was missing the mark, as they work towards management’s goal on service experience.
"Companies rarely equip their reps to succeed on the “emotion” side of the service interaction. It’s not about being nice but more advanced experience engineering tactics allow reps to actively manage the customer interaction. These tactics are rooted in the principles of human psychology and behavioural economics."
By working intensively with the team lead, the client managed to transform its customer service function within the targeted time frame of 6 months. By the end of 12 months, the client had reduced customer churn rates by 35 percent. Number of queries handled by agents reduced substantially, by 40%.
"The team at Genova Digital is well-versed in customer support issues in the utility sector. Through our discussions, we hatched new ideas on strategic direction but also tactics that impact how we interact with our customer on a day-to-day basis."
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