Did you join the recent Town Hall with Dave Cranfield and Rob Kerr? If you did you will have already heard about the new We Care initiative, and no doubt want to learn more. If not – where were you? 🤔
Let's explore "We Care" with Robert Kerr, Director of Customer Services
Robert, can you tell us more about the new "We Care" initiative?
As one of our Strategic Five Pillars we have made achieving excellent customer experience a key part of our strategy. However, we are not where we want to be yet.
"We Care" is the name we are giving to a programme of change we are making to enable our staff and organisation to deliver outstanding customer experience.
Sounds great, but why bother?
Delivering great customer experience is no longer optional (if it ever was). A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy:
- 68% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service experiences
- 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience
We must deliver against this as:
- A key enabler to protecting margin value is through delivering on Customer Experience.
- Through Social Medias customers can broadcast their opinion widely. Energy companies remain in the spotlight.
- Ofgem have placed treating all of customers fairly at the heart of regulatory policy.
- Delivering excellent customer experience is important to our staff, this was clear from our last Communication Days in 2023.
- Reducing Customer Effort and delivering a strong & consistent Customer Experience will reduce the cost to serve.
What will the "We care" programme consist of?
We are kicking off with a clear statement of what good looks like: The 10 Principles of Customer Engagement. These set of Principles will detail what we should aim to deliver every time a customer needs to contact us. They are the promises we make to ourselves and each other.
These will be our north star and sets our ambition. We want everyone to put these into action with every customer query or interaction.
We Care: Principles of Customer Engagement
Our expectation is that every time we engage with a customer we deliver on these principles
So that means everyone reading this newsletter, whether you speak to customers directly or support people who do – we need to deliver on these! Every person plays a part in the customer journey and these work whether your customer is internal or external.
But its not always easy to do this, what else is happening to help?
A lot!
- Simplification: We have already made changes to CQMS to refine query types and ensure all required information is captured to initiate work with our metering agents (Industry Operations). This has included halving the number of worklists used in the area, removing dozens of query types and using plain English for the rest.
- Targeting Approach: We have just introduced a new way of measuring queries moving from the simple 30-day measure to a bespoke SLA for each query type. This is already part of the KPI and you will shortly be receiving new improved reporting and supporting changes in CQMS so the SLA is visible to all staff. This means we will be able to give better information to our customers and also enables us to focus on efforts on queries which are taking too long.
- Training: Business Improvement will be rolling out a new online CQMS training and this will be followed later this year by a We Care training delivered by L&D – helping you deliver the best possible service to our customers.
- Quality: We will shortly go live with a quality function designed to ensure to track how we do against the principles and identify areas for improvement.
There is more planned but, how bring the "principles to life" ?
We are looking for great case studies and examples of how each principle can be brought to life through the customer's journey. If you have seen one please share this with the Marketing Team as it's often the best way to communicate on it! What's funnier than being interviewed by the Marketing team and try your luck to become famous within TGP UK's world?
