Don’t miss customer service opportunities

By Ethan Brown, Stephanie Cary, Florence Connally, and Sarah Weldon

Think of you and your customers as being on opposite sides of a canyon. Standing on one side, you want to control costs and meet your business objectives with self-service features on your web site and interactive voice response unit (IVR). On the other side, customers want to get the most service. When there’s no way across the canyon, everybody loses: customer satisfaction declines, and unhappy customers inundate your department with e-mails and phone calls that drive costs up and morale down.

That's the price of the service gap-the difference between what customers want and what energy companies offer.  E source, which provides independent, information services to utilities, major energy users, and other key players in the retail energy marketplace, has identified many missed opportunities through our recent benchmarking studies of utility web sites and IVRs from the residential consumer's perspective.

What should today's concerned utility do to both meet customers' needs and control costs? The answers may surprise you. While many expected self-service options, such as billing and payment, are being addressed, there are several major web site and IVR features that customers increasingly want-and that utilities either rarely offer or rarely offer well.

On The Web Site

Outage/emergency updates. Outage and emergency events are big drivers of customers to the utility web site. During major outage events, people go to their utility web site to seek out information on the restoration process. Some utilities have experienced the most customer web visits during such events. However, updates on outages and emergencies are the fourth least found feature on utility web sites. According to E source's 2009 review of North American web sites, only 43 percent of utilities provide outage update information on the web site.

Adding outage and emergency updates allow utilities to quickly communicate to customers, government agencies, and media while reducing call volumes. This information can be shown as aggregated information on outages in a geographic area, such as a town, street or zip code. It can also be account specific, requiring a customer to login to obtain updates on a specific outage. The best rated outage/emergency update features include both personalized information as well as a map that shows the locations of current outages.

Work order status. Customers also want to know whether the utility has received a service request, has scheduled it, if it is in progress, or has been completed. E source primary market research shows that 58 percent of residential customers want to see this feature on their utility web sites, yet only 16 percent of reviewed utilities support it-one of the largest gaps in web service E source found. 

To fill this gap, you can start by providing basic updates on start, stop, or transfer service functions. The best features allow customers to check the status of a work order without logging in to their account, or display the status of any pending work orders on the landing page immediately after logging in.

On The IVR

Reach a CSR. Self-service shouldn't be an obstacle between the customer and the reason for calling. When the option to speak to a customer service representative (CSR) is clearly presented, consumers are more comfortable using self-service features on the IVR: they know a CSR is willing to help them if there is any trouble. Recent E source market research shows that the overwhelming majority of consumers-80 percent-expect to hear the option to reach an agent on their utility IVR.

Although most companies offer this feature, it is often obscure and hard to find-a service gap in quality. More often than not, "Reach a CSR" features do not allow a customer to reach a CSR easily, causing more frustration to the customer who is already frustrated. Opportunities for improvement include clearly announcing the CSR feature and making it more prominent to customers.

Hear If and When Service Will Be Disconnected. Especially sensitive to customers are IVR options that relate to credit and collections, as most utilities don't get to all of their disconnection orders each month-leaving some customers anxious, wondering if and when they will be disconnected. According to our market research, 56 percent of consumers strongly feel that their energy provider should offer information on disconnect order status on the IVR, but our 2009 review of utility IVRs shows that only 14 percent of utilities offer this feature-a 42 percent service gap. A good approach was to simply announce to customers that their service was subject to disconnection and to give an option to speak to an agent if they had further questions. Automating this information on the IVR allows a company to devote their CSRs to calls that are not simply restating automated information.

The Fine Art of Gap-Shrinking

You don't have to be Eval Knieval to jump the gap between you and your customers. You don't have to jump it at all-you just have to make it smaller by finding the major causes of your service gap, adding the features your customers want, and making those features work for your customers.

There are many ways that even the most well-intentioned IVRs or web sites can go wrong. The features above are only four of the 44 customer service features we discuss in the "2009 E source Review of North American Electric and Gas Company Web Sites" and the "2009 E source Review of North American Electric and Gas Company IVRs." But if you keep the customer in mind throughout your design process, the benefits in customer satisfaction can be immense. One customer described his experience of an outage and emergency update feature as: "This experience is very personal and lets me know that my outage is important to the utility." This customer, who actively chose self-service as his preferred channel, had a great experience without taking up valuable agent time. Here, the gap has disappeared.