Citizens Advice will take into account email and social media response times when calculating its star ratings table for energy retailers going forward.
It will also remove failed suppliers from the star rating and adjust the rankings accordingly, a recently published decision document has revealed.
The consumer charity has decided not to include telephone ringbacks and calls that are dropped before an agent is reached in its customer service metrics. It will continue to investigate the use of webchat but this will not be included at the moment.
Email response times
The majority of respondents to a customer service consultation told Citizens Advice agreed broadly with its proposal to introduce email as a customer service metric.
Two disagreed however, citing concerns that consumers are using email as a contact channel less frequently and that staff were less well equipped to deal with queries via email than via telephone. Yet responses to a request for information (RFI) suggest that email is the second most common contact channel (after telephone).
The new email metric will be mandatory, meaning suppliers will be scored zero for this component if they do not offer it. Furthermore, performance will be measured against a response time of two working days.
Social media
Again only two respondents disagreed with the proposal to introduce a social media customer service metric.
These cited concerns that reporting on this metric would be expensive and that their own evidence suggests “customers do not see social media as an important method of communication”.
Additional points raised by those who agreed with the metric included the fact that tracking this metric could be “onerous” for suppliers.
This metric will be measured from responses to private messages sent on Facebook and Twitter, but only in instances where it makes up 5 per cent or more of the overall contacts for a supplier.
Webchat
While webchat was recognised as growing in importance, the charity noted issues around accurately measuring its performance.
As a result, Citizens Advice said it is not looking to include the metric at this stage and is instead looking at ways of introducing it in the near future.
“The inclusion of webchat is likely to be based on a similar principle to social media, requiring overall supplier contacts to meet a minimum threshold”, the paper said.
Additional telephone metrics
The charity has decided not to include telephone abandonment rates, the percentage of inbound phone calls which are abandoned by a customer before speaking to an agent. It has also decided not to include scheduled ringbacks as an additional customer service metric.
Evidence from the RFI suggested that while the data collected on telephone abandonments was good, this was also highly correlated with telephone wait times.
Additionally, respondents pointed out that telephone abandonment rates could be a sign of effective signposting in the interactive voice recordings (IVR).
In addition to the charity’s decisions on updating the customer service metric, it has decided to include Energy UK’s vulnerability charter in the customer commitments metric.
Ombudsman Services
The charity will proceed with proposals to look at completed rather than accepted cases when analysing the Energy Ombudsman’s complaints data when compiling the star ratings table.
The charity says the advantage of this change will be that the risk of delay to the rating will decrease, and the burden on resources across suppliers, the Energy Ombudsman and Citizens Advice will “ease significantly”.
The charity intends to align its switching metric with Ofgem’s proposed approach for the guaranteed standards on switching. The standards are designed to ensure that consumers are compensated by suppliers when delays and erroneous switches occur.
Furthermore, it has issued a clarification around what it considers are acceptable phone lines used in determining the call waiting time metric.
Telephone numbers must be clearly advertised on a suppliers’ website/ bills and must be customer initiated, meaning systems where consumers can only speak to suppliers on the phone by requesting a call would be excluded.
They must also be available for a variety of consumer issues – this excludes phone lines which only deal with narrow queries. Furthermore, they cannot be fully automated.