How to Build a Winning Experience When Customers Don't Trust You

Customer Management IQ's UK content editor Helen Winsor recently spoke with Hugo Harding, the head of retail and commercial for smart metering at EDF Energy. Harding will be presenting at the Customer Experience Management for Utilities conference, April 29-30, 2013 in London. A transcript of their conversation follows:

Customer Management IQ: And I’m now joined by Hugo Harding, Head of Retail and Commercial for Smart Metering at EDF Energy. Welcome, Hugo.

H Harding: Hello.

Customer Management IQ: Hi. So, Hugo, what would you say has been EDF Energy’s greatest customer experience and service achievement to date?

H Harding: Well, I wouldn’t want to speak about what’s happened before I joined EDF Energy, which was about seven years ago, but since I have been here I’ve been really pleased with the way that customer experience delivery has moved up the priority list and is now right at the forefront. Our CEO, Vincent de Rivaz, came out with his desire to rebuild trust with our customers, explaining the Trust Agenda: around us wanting to be more transparent, more open with our consumers, to deliver better energy, fair value, better service.

For me as a customer experience leader, it’s very pleasing to see that our CEO takes this extremely seriously. And I think we’ve just laid out that agenda so I’m looking forward to, over the years, how we start to deliver and put customer experience at the top.

It’s also been supported recently - hopefully many of your listeners would have seen our new advertising of Feel Better Energy - with our new orange character, Zingy.

Again, from a B2C marketing point of view - and B2B - putting our customers up the agenda, recognising how important it is to rebuild trust and to deliver to their customer needs has just been something that we haven’t always prioritised in the past, so exciting times ahead.

Customer Management IQ: Absolutely. And what are your three biggest challenges in your customer experience projects moving into 2013, and why?

H Harding: So bearing in mind I work on the Smart Metering Programme and heading up the Retail and Customer work stream, customer experience is my accountability. It’s a programme because it’s actually a series of projects underneath: new systems, new processes, new end-to-end customer experience. So that is, all those components are, by far my biggest challenge, moving through this year as we approach the beginning of the government mandate roll-out to customers from 2014 and beyond. Great challenges lie ahead and lots to tackle.

Customer Management IQ: So let’s talk about one of your top challenges. In your presentation you’re addressing how smart metering will impact on customer experience delivery. What are the challenges associated with this?

H Harding: Our government mandate from the Department of Energy and Climate Change is for the energy suppliers to lead the smart metering roll-out for the UK. Now, it’s not altogether unique, but it’s very different compared to many other smart metering roll-outs that have been more Networks-based; in other words, not factoring in or considering the end customer.

The government deliberately wants to go the other way and put the Suppliers on the hook for delivering the roll-out, in order to get consumer engagement and to deliver that winning customer experience, so that our consumers can engage with what smart metering brings, and the step change that smart metering will bring, to our industry, around all those key things that will help us deliver to our Trust Agenda: simplicity, transparency.

In that context, the challenge is we have to engage every single one of our customers, so for EDF Energy that’s four million households. We have to explain the benefits that smart metering brings to our customers to allow them to let us into their homes, fit the meters, and start them on their new smart customer journey.

And considering where we are as an energy industry today, there is a mistrust, there is scepticism 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.

I think also, as a business, inherently the roll-out of smart metering is going to be expensive, so we need to make sure that we roll-out effectively and efficiently. So it’s that dual challenge as all businesses have: to maintain an excellent customer experience whilst delivering business benefit and efficiency.

Customer Management IQ: And what’s the one thing you’d like the customer experience solution provider community to do to help you to address these challenges?

H Harding: One thing that instantly comes to mind, is in the water industry, for example. I know that they have been on a smart metering-type drive - or AMR, which are like smart meters - so I’d like to understand from my peers at the conference, in this community, innovative new ideas to engage whole communities. The single biggest challenge - apart from the technical challenges around how to support smart metering, and all the industry and security specifications – the single biggest challenge for me as the customer experience lead is to engage our consumers and get them to open the doors and welcome our engineers with open arms. And I would love any of my peers at this event to help me come up with new and innovative ways of engaging on a large scale.

Customer Management IQ: And finally, what are your top tips for developing a customer-centric culture within a utility company?

H Harding: In utilities especially, I think consistency of experience delivery is always a major challenge. We are a service industry, we are a marketing industry, we are a product development industry. And so customer experience is delivered through a multitude of different ways – through systems, through processes, through people, of course, through marketing. And the top tip for me is that you need to understand all of those different components and how they work, so that when you deliver something, a new customer experience initiative, you are thinking of the end to end. The classic example is it’s very easy to come up with a lovely, glossy marketing campaign, but if the service operations delivery of that experience behind the promise isn’t up to scratch, then you’ll quickly be found out and you will quickly not succeed in delivering what consumers want.

Because, at the end of the day, consumers from utilities want good service and they want good, fair pricing and they want transparency. You can make those promises relatively easily through marketing and through campaigns, but it’s how you deliver those through your systems and through your people and your processes that really count. So that, for me, is a big driver.

As well, knowing what I do now around how the energy industry works, even getting the simple stuff right is a challenge, so you need to focus on nailing the basics first. And then once you’ve got that and you’re delivering to the core consumer needs of: just bill me fairly, answer my calls, deal with my complaints timely and efficiently and correctly, then you can start to get more aspirational about where to take your customers, what journey to take them on. But you need to deliver your primary objective first and foremost.