Exclusive Report: Multi-Channel Consistency of Great "Utility" to Customer Experience

Call it reputation management, call it peer pressure, call it good business sense. But whatever you call it, make no mistake, today’s business leaders face a compulsion to prioritize the customer experience.

While their ultimate obligation might be creating wealth for their shareholders, their mechanism for doing so, according to report after report and presentation after presentation, is improving the customer experience. By delivering a better experience for the customer, the organization will improve satisfaction levels, which leads to more loyalty and ultimately more monetary inflow.

By unifying the business around this pivotal focus, an emphasis on creating the optimal customer experience is also likely to streamline—rather than, as misconception would suggest, increase—spend. Businesses that minimize hurdles to collecting customer feedback and then use those insights to fix broken processes will naturally see bottom line improvements.

But while this holistic approach to customer management seems sensible enough, certain industries face particular—and significant—complications on their roads to excellence.

The utilities sector, both for the ways in which it interacts with customers and its history of trust issues with customers, faces very unique challenges, and a recent Call Center IQ study out of the United Kingdom worked to quantify those challenges as well as the industry’s selected solutions.

The study, which addresses many of the focuses at the upcoming Customer Experience Management for Utilities conference,April 28-29, London, reveals that creating an efficient, unified multi-channel customer experience is the paramount priority for European utilities. This clear truth exists absent particular trends regarding on the type of utility service provided or specific geographic location.

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Creating the "consistent" experience

Responding to an entirely-open-ended question about key obstacles, more than 44% of respondents outright identified multi-channel challenges as their top priorities. Already representing a greater response share than any other topic, the emphasis on multi-channel was particularly notable because descriptors like "consistent" or "coherent" existed in more than half of the responses.

For utilities, it is therefore not enough to offer customer support and interaction across a multitude of channels. The service function must be unified across each channel to provide a consistent, seamless experience for customers.

Consistency is the name of the game for executives like Tim Hughes, the chief customer officer for Welsh water, who made it his thesis in a conversation with Call Center IQ’s Helen Winsor.

After already discussing the need to align the brand proposition with the actual service experience, Hughes added, "there is [another] challenge around actually being consistent about the delivery of your service proposition when you’re dealing with millions of customers every day through multiple channels."

Hughes’ statement echoes the aforementioned survey responses, which included comments like, "Given a consistent service across channels," "consistent answers to customer inquiries" and "manage coherently all the channels through which customers interact."

While the broader challenge of delivering a consistent channel experience represents the big picture priority, utilities organizations are also investing greatly into specific support channels. Asked about top customer experience priorities on a 1-10 scale, considerably more than 50% identified phone service, web service and self-service as top investment priorities (at least 7/10 or higher)

Self-service, in particular, stands out; 29% of responses labeled its importance a 10 out of 10.

And though emphasis on social media was not quite so strong, an impressive 62% rated its importance at 6/10 or higher, providing an exclamation point for the declaration that the multi-channel experience is a significant priority for utilities firms.

Rather than calling to gush over "cool experiences" or to excitedly buy a new pair of shoes, today’s utilities customers focus on black-and-white issues like bill payments and service outages. And to the extent that they never should have to deal with problems in those realms, when they do, it is imperative that their experience is not complicated or compromised by their channel preference.

Building the business case

The unavoidable truth of that previous statement should make investment into a cohesive multi-channel experience a no-brainer. Customers demand seamless, hassle-free, consistent service across all touch points, and knowing this, customer experience leaders have identified channel consistency as the biggest executive priority.

Why, then, is there any hesitation or debate? Why are utilities organizations not racing to implement strategies and technology that assure channel coherency?

The almighty dollar.

Even though the best businesses know there is a clear correlation between the quality of a customer experience and the business’ ability to generate revenue, a mental barrier exists to fully embracing that connection. When making any sort of transformative business investment, leaders tend to pay more attention to the initial--and often significant--upfront costs than the murkier, long-term benefits.

The instant gratification phenomenon makes particular victims out of social and online channels, which are still in their infant stages as far as meaningful revenue generation (let alone ROI measurement goes). And that uncertainty exists even for e-commerce organizations, which can—and should—use social channels to literally drive customers to points of purchase.

With utilities, in which the most common reasons for engagement involve information-sharing or customer support, the natural connection between multi-channel investment and profitability is even less clear.

Customer management leaders know they need to develop a consistent channel message and therefore know they must overcome the cost objection, but actually doing so remains a pressing challenge in the utilities space.

Tim Hughes notes that a key challenge, "Really, revolves around developing business cases for emerging customer trends, typically in social media. So the ability to see a trend and then understand exactly how you can deliver a great service. Sometimes that’s difficult because those trends are just emerging and some of the costs can be quite considerable, and making them business-beneficial is sometimes challenging."

Vattenfall’s head of online capability Bas Touw shares in that sentiment, noting concerns about budget adversely impact the business’ ability to achieve all of its multi-channel objectives.

"We also want to improve customer experience across channel," says Touw. "IT budgets are not endless, so you have to make choices.

"There needs to be a balance between offering a good-enough customer service and the cost we want to put there and, in our case, helping customers who are struggling online, and offering them a good live support."

Embracing the business case

But, contrary to conventional customer management wisdom, there is also an upside to the emphasis on cost control. Insofar as the best customer experience initiatives warrant that label because they drive meaningful results for the business, it is important that customer management leaders see the business’ green-colored glasses as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

As long as leaders commit to proving their strategies will positive impact the bottom line, they will receive the organization’s blessing to keep serving the customer.

That means utilities companies, especially given how important price is to the customer experience (59% rate price at least a 9/10 when it comes to influence on which supplier a customer selects), must constantly think about how customer experience decision will impact the business. They cannot successfully satisfy customers by needlessly raising prices, and they cannot satisfy stakeholders by needlessly enduring costs, and can thus use business pressures to think critically about the best strategic investments.

Central to that opportunity is toeing the line between initiatives driven by emotion and those driven by profit.

"We've had to rigorously prioritize our activity and part of that prioritization is really understanding and measuring the customer benefit and the business benefit," explains E.ON UK’s head of experience design Andrew Franklin." "Emotional impact accounts for over half of the impact of the experience…it’s really important to us, and I need help really in finding a way to measure the business value created by the emotional impact."

Trust in the experience

Unlike hotel chains and theme parks, utilities companies rarely have the opportunity to glamorously engage with their customers. There is nothing fun, exciting, thrilling or endearing about most such customer interactions, and as a result, the companies are not in a position to "wow" their customers.

No matter how influential and inspiring it might be, the "Disney experience" is not a perfectly-traceable blueprint for a utilities firm’s customer experience.

But utilities companies face an important challenge that paves way to an important opportunity. Like financial institutions, utilities companies have been subject to questions of trust and concerns about their motivations and customer-centricity. Rather than being held in a high esteem that will only be tested if they fail, utilities companies are often expected to underdeliver for customers.

That means that their opportunity to impress begins with rebuilding trust and showing that a utilities organization can deliver a valuable, though perhaps not "glamorous," experience for customers. If utilities firms can demonstrate a clear motivational link between customer needs and their support strategies, they will go a long way in turning their experience into an asset rather than a liability.

And insofar as the study reveals that 59% of utilities firms rate the experience’s impact on provider selection at a 8/10 or higher, exploiting that asset will be invaluable in preserving—and gaining—market share.

As Hugo Harding, Head of Retail and Commercial for Smart Metering at EDF Energy, explains, "Considering where we are as an energy in the industry today, there is a mistrust, there is skepticism around the aims and objectives of energy suppliers, and we’ve got to overcome that and we’ve got to be clear on the benefits and how smart metering and how customers’ energy providers can build a winning customer experience based on trust, transparency and simplicity. So, a massive challenge ahead."

Mistrust and lack of excitement create an unfortunate gap between utilities firms and their customers. That gap is inhibiting significant progress in creating the emotional satisfaction that drives business opportunity and revenue.

By tying oneself to customer needs—and providing a consistent, valuable experience across channels—utilities firms can escape the stigma and distance themselves from the pack. They can parlay customer interaction into revenue-generating opportunities rather than costly ones. They can minimize the logistical burden placed on the organization every time something goes wrong.

They can make the customer experience a pathway to business excellence rather than a roadblock.