CX Is Now Essential For Utilities That Want To Retain Customers
In the evolving landscape of liberalized energy markets, utility companies are grappling with heightened customer expectations. The yoummday platform provides a superior solution by offering experienced and flexible customer service representatives, addressing recruitment challenges and ensuring swift resolution in a competitive environment where meeting customer demands is crucial.
Utility companies generally don’t have a good reputation for the quality of their customer service processes. This is partly historic, because competition used to be rare in this sector. If customers have no choice of the company supplying their gas, water, and electricity then there is no incentive to deliver an excellent customer experience.
But this has changed. In Europe, we are now in the third decade of energy market liberalization. Across the entire continent it is mostly the case that customers and companies can choose which utility supplies their energy and water.
This means that the old attitudes about the value of customer service to utility customers must be updated. It is also important to be aware of the increase in customer expectations too. In the retail industry this has been called the ‘Amazon Effect’. This describes the effect on customers of seeing how good service can be - many retail and e-commerce companies have had to dramatically improve service levels because customers compare their service to Amazon.
It is increasingly true that this same Amazon Effect is creating customer expectations that cross different industries. A customer that has a smooth and easy experience with Amazon will question why their bank is so difficult to interact with - they will compare the bank to Amazon. Now the same is becoming true with utilities.
Some research has suggested that service from utilities has deteriorated. Many company leaders have argued that this spike in poor service is closely linked to the high energy prices in 2022, but regardless of how the decline started many cus-tomers feel that service levels are in decline.
Many utilities have outsourced their customer service processes - often overseas. This can address the recruitment problems many European companies face at present, but it doesn’t often result in a fantastic customer experience. Many customers dislike calling their energy company when they face a personal crisis and not being able to understand the customer service representative because of their accent. There are many examples of energy companies that gave up on outsourcing and relocated customer service back to their home country again.
The Yoummday platform offers utilities a new and improved solution to all these problems of customer service recruitment and quality. The platform offers thousands of high quality and experienced customer service representiatives that are available flexibly.
The utility company can define how many additional team members they need or how many shifts should be covered and the platform will find the appropriate cover.
It’s essential for utility companies to explore a more flexible customer service solution because comparison sites now offer customers the ability to immediately change their energy supplier. In many cases, a customer can find a better deal and switch to a new supplier in minutes.
Research has found that most customers are willing to forgive a poor service experience once - just once. Over 80% of customers will considering moving to a new service provider if they have two or more poor experiences with the customer service team.
This fact alone should be enough to make anyone responsible for customer service at a utility explore alternative options. If you need to find experienced customer service agents with knowledge of energy company services and also find them locally then you need to explore the Yoummday platform.
