While Mark Royle and his fellow Zebra Power co-owners Andrew Bailey and Pete George collectively have more than a century of experience in the energy sector, the real lessons have come from launching and running their own retailer.
“I have probably learned more in the last 3 years than I had in the previous 30”, Royle tells Utility Week. The chief executive of the challenger brand is delighted by his company’s showing at the latest Citizens Advice star ratings table, coming third overall. Zebra is one of a number of challenger brands which have been recognised by the consumer charity for their superior levels of customer service.
Founded in 2017, Zebra is a Manchester-based retailer which has 20 employees covering around 15,000 customers. Royle places great emphasis on staff retention as he believes this is key to delivering good customer service.
He begins: “We have a reasonably low staff turnover rate which helps us going forward maintain a consistent service. We concentrate on retention of those staff members.”
As part of the company’s efforts to retain its younger employees, Zebra is introducing day release schemes to allow them to attend Higher National Certificate courses at a local technical college. Royle understands that while larger suppliers can afford the luxury of having entire teams dedicated to one area of customer service, smaller suppliers such as Zebra must ensure their teams are well-versed in a variety of issues.
He continues: “Once they have built up the knowledge over three to six months, you don’t want to lose those people going forward. I think larger suppliers are good at say having a specialist team that does customer moves, but as a smaller company you can’t just have one person dedicated to one thing – they’ve got to be able to do a variety of tasks. With that you have got to skill them up a bit more, so you are covering a wider spectrum. If you want to deliver good customer service, you have got to be able to retain your staff and keep them educated and trained going forward.”
Of its main customer service team, the majority are age 30 or below and while the office may have a young vibe, Royle says Zebra provides tariffs and services that are targeted at a much older demographic, with the average age being around 70 for some of its services.
“We target a slightly older demographic of customers and we do a variety of things. We still do footfall reads if they want it and paper billing. When you ring into the call centre number we have quite tight SLAs about picking the phone up and we don’t have a menu system for the phone.”
A swift pickup time is something Zebra prides itself on and the supplier was given the maximum five stars by Citizens Advice for its average call waiting time of 23 seconds. Royle believes the most important element of good customer service is quick response times. Being a smaller supplier does have its advantages in this respect, with their larger counterparts often having no choice but to rely on phone menu systems to service the millions of customers they have.
“If you are able to respond speedily, it often helps to diffuse more tricky situations that you are faced with when you get into the detail of the enquiry or call.”
He said it’s important that there are escalation points whereby there the team leader become involved if they haven’t been resolved within 48 hours: “We automate all that. We use a service desk piece of software behind all this – a generic industry package called Zoho Desk – for dealing with all those types of enquiry.”
To help respond to and measure customer enquiries, Zoho Desk creates service tickets to be actioned by agents when customers send in emails. The software escalates tickets to managers if they have not been answered within a specific time period.
He adds: “You have got to be able to monitor and measure customer service. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s as simple as that.”
Yet Covid-19 has presented customer service challenges for retailers great and small, with recent months seeing a huge shift towards home working. Zebra is soon to begin operating on a 50/50 rota, with half of its staff returning to office work while the other work from home before alternating. Furthermore, since the government announced it wanted workers to start moving back into offices where possible, around a quarter of Zebra’s staff voluntarily switched back to office working.
“What is important to us is we maintain the customer service level going forward because otherwise, even though maybe in the first week or two customers might have forgiven you for being an extra 30 seconds on the phone, longer term they are not going to accept that. They are going to want to get back to normal and we have got to manage and get that back to normal as soon as we can and make sure that the service levels don’t slip at any point.”
Being a smaller retailer certainly has its advantages when it comes to working through a global pandemic. Zebra had a dry-run in February to ensure its systems can cope with homeworking. Smaller numbers of staff are easier to manage whereas some of the larger suppliers like Npower had the unenviable task of migrating thousands of employees to homeworking. Furthermore, Zebra’s incoming 50/50 system is designed as a safeguard against staff who may contract the virus.
Says Royle: “If things get worse in the winter, we want to be in a position where we can transition back to working from home without having people come in the office and pick up kit or us asking people to take it home. We wanted to completely be able to isolate immediately. If we have an outbreak in our office, we have got part of a plan effectively that if one of the group gets it, everyone else in that group has to stay at home.”
A smaller customer book is also seen as an advantage to providing good levels of customer service and Royle is acutely aware of the risks of taking on too many customers, too soon. This has been the downfall of some challenger brands over the last two years, with nine exiting the market last year alone. He explains that his company cautiously scales up, rather than seeking to acquire too many customers than it can handle.
“We did some intentional things. For the first 12-18 months, we hit 5,000 customers and stayed there until we made sure the customer service processes were working as we wanted them to work and then we only started going forward when we understood what we were doing; that we could operate correctly within the industry frameworks et cetera.”
“I’ve been in the utilities market since the early 80s, both in the UK and overseas. We’ve seen this situation where suppliers are set up and grown quickly and one of the things we were conscious of was trying to avoid that pitfall of the financial challenges of growing quickly, but also the operational challenges,” he adds.