How National Grid is Learning to Build Relationships in the Contact Center

Many of today’s customer management professionals commonly talk a big game about the importance of CRM. Relationship-building, they argue, is a fundamental tenet of all contact center interactions.

But knowing something needs to be done and knowing how to actually do it are two vastly different things. And, as a result of that difference, a far smaller proportion of customer management professionals has actually been successful in escalating "talk" of customer relationship building into meaningful "walk."

Barriers to successfully leveraging customer touchpoints for CRM purposes are aplenty, and within the utilities industry, one is particularly intimidating: relationship-building represents a drastic departure from the historical conception of customer service.

Speaking to Customer Management IQ, Martin Neat, customer centre manager, National Grid, reveals that utilities contact centers can no longer rest on the laurels of their past, transaction-minded upbringing. Business success and efficiency hinges on the ability to approach certain customer interactions with a keen eye for forging relationships.

"A transactional and unemotional response is absolutely fine most of the time; it's what customers [often] want," explains Neat. "They want us to appear efficient and they want us to take details very quickly.

"[But] in order to outperform our regulated income, we need to find ways of creating operational efficiencies and this means having staff that can switch between transactional, unemotional activities and ones where there potentially is a need to build relationships."

In this exclusive podcast, Neat, a presenter at the 2012 Customer Experience Management for Utilities conference, May 8-10, London, shares how his organization has grown—culturally and logistically—to excel under this new conception of a customer contact center.

And if you like what he has to say, definitely join us at the event in May! Event agenda now available:

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