It is coming up to two-and-a-half years since the introduction of Ofwat’s service incentive mechanism (Sim), a groundbreaking initiative linking customer perception and satisfaction to the amount water companies can charge for their services. It is now providing a real financial incentive for water companies to reshape services to meet the needs of the end user.
Customer service has to be ingrained in every act and every interaction the company undertakes with its customers and the wider community. If it is not, then customer feedback in Sim surveys will be poor and the company will slip down the Sim ladder. Consequently, investing in people to deliver a personal service and to get things right first time has become vital.
Achieving this requires courage and difficult decisions for water companies. They need the vision to set their staff free and create a culture in which serving the customer is key. On a practical level, this requires a significant cultural change that shares responsibility for service delivery between central planning teams and the crews on the ground.
This does not mean ripping up the operational guidelines, ignoring health and safety requirements or failing to deliver a cost-effective service. However, in a Sim world, water companies have to build in a degree of flexibility and empower staff to tailor operational procedures to meet the needs of individual customers. This can be as simple as freeing crews to use their own judgement about where they dig access trenches or place spoil heaps to avoid blocking access to drives or reducing pavement space. Such simple steps can make a huge difference to overall customer satisfaction.
One way of achieving more flexibility in implementing service standards is through the use of customer charters. These can set out pledges that the company has for meeting customer service standards – for instance, promising to behave in a courteous manner when speaking with customers and pledging to always leave sites clean and tidy at the end of a shift. Training staff to use their problem-solving skills to look objectively at practical challenges and find ways to address them is a key part of this process.
Beyond such simple steps, companies also have to ask themselves whether the business processes that lie behind standard operational procedures that guide service delivery are driven by a customer-centric ethos or have been developed for operational expediency. For example, one company we worked with had 8am-4pm appointments for customer visits because this was convenient for staff scheduling and work flows. However, for householders working full time, the lack of flexibility around out-of-hours appointments meant the company failed to deliver high levels of satisfaction. Simply introducing Saturday morning appointments made a huge difference to the customer experience.
Empowering staff to focus on delivering service to the customer can also equate to more efficient service delivery, with less disruption and more practical solutions developed by the teams on the ground.
Ben Bax, head of customer and client services, regulated services, May Gurney
All ears
In the two-and-a-half years since the Sim was introduced, technology to help support service standards has improved significantly and is delivering a broader view of the real voice of the customer. Contemporary customer feedback monitoring and analysis technologies are proving particularly useful in building a unified picture of what customers are saying about a company. Such platforms now make it relatively easy to gain overall visibility of feedback across a range of channels, both traditional and new, including phone calls, written letters, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging.
In an industry that is so dependent on physical infrastructure, the ability to see the aggregated thoughts of your customer base has an unexpected bonus: automatic reports on specific activities can be linked to the geographical origin of communications, so faults such as low pressure or ill-treated water can be identified and engineers dispatched to the scene, almost as soon as customers themselves are aware of a problem.
Feedback monitoring can also capture broad references to your brand, including those made outside the contact centre. Such unsolicited information can be aggregated with direct customer feedback data from the contact centre to provide a vivid picture of customer perceptions and the effectiveness of your customer service system.
Steve Rosier, director, Verint.
Know it all
Delivering consistently high levels of customer service is not easy. One of the biggest challenges is how you manage and share an ever-growing pool of knowledge across your entire customer service operation.
Insights about how to handle specific customer issues or complaints come from years of training and experience, which is unlikely to be equally distributed across customer service teams. Specific knowledge may be stored in the heads of key staff, or on their desktop PCs. What happens when experienced staff take a holiday or move on?
Up to now, many water companies have relied on printed manuals and physical folders to share customer service information and expertise, and on experienced “floor walkers” to come to the aid of customer service staff who require assistance when answering tricky calls. But these methods are slow and inefficient and information quickly becomes out of date.
Given the challenges posed by Sim, water companies need to consider knowledge management technology. These systems allow staff to type in customer questions in plain English and quickly access answers on screen. This can reduce average handle times and increase all-important first contact resolution rates. A centralised knowledge management system also makes it easy to respond to changing circumstances, because information can be quickly added, updated and made available to all staff.
Ensuring staff are fully involved with the knowledge management system is vital to its success. They should participate in early focus groups to help design the system and identify the questions and answers that should populate it. There should also be an integrated feedback mechanism, which prompts staff to rate how useful an answer was in addressing a customer’s query. That way the most helpful answers will rise to the top while less useful ones will be flagged for updating.
Dee Roche, director, Eptica
This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 14th September 2012.
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