Customer service

Good customer service is vital to our success. So wherever possible, we want to resolve our customers’ enquiries on first contact. That’s the ultimate goal of the 1,900 frontline advisers who work in our contact centres based in the North East of England.

2008 was, however, a challenging year for our customer service teams. The rise in wholesale energy costs and the subsequent increase in our retail tariffs led to an unprecedented level of customer enquiries, putting a big strain on our teams.
This meant that we were unable to deliver our business plan promise of handling 75% of calls in 20 seconds and we also saw an increase in complaint levels compared to 2007.

Encouragingly, the second half of 2008 saw improvements in our service as contact centre service levels improved and both complaints to energywatch and the Energy Ombudsman started to reduce.

What we did in 2008

In order to meet the increased demands from our customers a number of initiatives were put in place to improve our service:

• In 2008 all of our customers could be served from a single billing platform following the completion of a three-year systems migration programme at the end of 2007.
• We recruited 347 more people across customer services.
• We changed the way we deal with queries by creating ‘centres of excellence’ – so someone who has a specific enquiry can now call the relevant team direct on a dedicated number.
• We used customer feedback to identify the most frequent reasons why people call and then provided enhanced training to our advisors on how to deal with these issues, as well as with less common queries.
• We launched a new, more interactive induction programme for new starters at our contact centres using accelerated learning techniques.
• We teamed up with Citizens Advice and Age Concern to set up a direct line and e mail address putting people directly in touch with designated teams, so that jointly we could provide help and support to our customers who had sought their advice.

The results

We won two major awards in 2008 – the Business in the Community National Example of Excellence Award for our Skills for Life Programme, and the North East Contact Centre Award for Best Practice in People Development.

Complaints fell over the summer months, from a peak of 199 Ombudsman complaints in July 2008, to 104 in December 2008. Energywatch cases also reduced from April onwards. By the time that energywatch ceased to exist, at the end of September 2008, they were at their lowest level for the year.

In October 2008, energywatch (the industry’s consumer watchdog) was replaced, through the passing of the Consumers Estate Agents and Redress Act 2007 (the CEAR ACT), by a three tier system:

• Consumer Direct providing a single point of contact for consumers, covering all markets, for information and advice.
• Consumer Focus which deals with individual complaints relating to disconnection or involving vulnerable customers.
• Energy Ombudsman Service which had already been established in July 2006.

In addition Ofgem introduced a new Complaint Handling Standard for the energy industry. We welcome this change particularly as it ensures that all suppliers have a clear and visible complaint journey for customers.

In support of this change we enhanced our complaints processes and introduced changes to our bespoke complaints system. However, since the introduction of Consumer Direct and Consumer Focus, complaint data for each supplier has not been published and therefore our reporting for 2008 only includes energywatch data to the end of September.

We believe one complaint is still one too many. So in 2009, we’ll continue to focus on improving our customer service, streamlining our processes and systems, and investing in training leaving us even better placed to resolve our customer queries on first contact.