Setting 500 customer care staff up for homeworking within a few short weeks while maintaining customer service and adding thousands of households to its priority register took a mammoth effort from all involved, said Northumbrian’s director of corporate affairs.
Louise Hunter told Utility Week the “new normal” would take lessons from the experience of flexible homeworking made possible by the joint work of IT and customer service teams.
“It’s early days but I never thought it would be possible to transform our customer contact centres to homeworking almost overnight,” Hunter said. “It would be a real shame to oversee that innovation and not take some of the important learning from it and think about how we can use it to help our business in the future.”
She said staff are involved in the discussions to understand what is working and what isn’t. Some people welcome the flexibility and no commute while others miss the interactions of the office.
“If I told our executive team and our customer two months ago that our plan was to move all of the customer contact centres to homeworking and have all 500 people working from home as our future model, I would have been laughed out the place and told it could never have been done. Now – out of necessity and team working as well as real innovation – they have managed to achieve that in a couple of weeks. It has been incredible.”
Hunter said the company had previously invested in technology that made the transition possible and trials had begun to enable homeworking in the event of bad weather preventing staff travelling to work.
“We’ve had capability from a resilience point of view but people weren’t used to doing it and we’d never tried it at this scale. We never imagined for that we’d have everyone working from home in such a quick, or unusual way.”
She said the pandemic contingency plan included scenarios for a vastly reduced workforce but such planning did not cover this extent of homeworking.
Hunter said the IT teams that orchestrated the manoeuvre deserved special praise. “A huge shout out for Alison Owens and Martin Jackson and all the teams that work under Nigel Watson. They’ve been absolute superstars and are really committed to helping us keep our people safe and doing it effectively and really quickly.”
In the customer service teams, she said head of customer service Kelly Graham and Helen Lumsden, head of customer operations deserved commendation.
“The work they have done is amazing. Not just caring deeply about their people, and making sure vulnerable people were immediately protected, but also making sure staff working from home had all the support they needed – and ensured customers still got the service they need.”
She said across the company people “really pulled out all the stops” to switch the 500 staff in the customer teams to home working over a two week period. “It was a phenomenal exercise in what an amazing team effort – with support from IT – were able to achieve.”
She said the transition was made with a focus on maintaining customer service, particularly important because of the increased queries about financial support.
Online training was provided for staff without immediate access to hardware to develop skills in back office or social media work and the transition was achieved in stages with high-risk staff moved immediately to homeworking followed by critical roles and those handling queries about water supply and sewerage issues.
“We’ve got a strong culture of innovation, so the ‘can-do’ attitude is part of how we do things but it’s great to see that coming into action. It’s fascinating to see the inventions and innovations people come up with as the result of dealing with a crisis.”
Hunter said the teams experienced increased numbers of calls about financial assistance with around 2,000 billpayers moving to a social tariff scheme and 4,500 households taking advantage of a payment break.
“We have been able to maintain our services and the call centre. That’s been really important to our customers and we’ve had some amazing feedback from customers who are grateful they have had a real conversation with somebody who understands and is empathetic to the situation and is able to offer them immediate and practical support.”
Despite the company’s investment its IT and digital infrastructure, the digital capability available in employee’s homes was more limited so mobile phones and dongles were quickly issued to enable staff to access the company’s systems.
Over two days the IT team called 200 staff to talk them through access and system issues they were experiencing and to handle more digital contacts with customers than before.
“I’d be a liar if I said it’s gone smoothly because it hasn’t, but I’m really impressed that everyone has rolled up their sleeves and been flexible.”
Having responded to the immediate crisis, Hunter said the company is now reflecting upon what has worked well and what can be used in the longer-term that could benefit staff and services.