Technology for improved customer sentiment in utilities

Automate the everyday

In the first instance, giving your team the time to create positive conversation is key.

Automating elements of the customer service journey is a vital part of removing repetitive tasks from your customer service team’s day. Not only does that make them more efficient and able to deal with genuine problems more quickly and in more depth, it also improves their own perception of their role. By removing repetition from their day, you introduce more variety to their job – something we all appreciate at work.

Reducing the reliance on human interaction – when done right – is a positive step. Most people don’t want to spend half an hour in a queue to sort out their direct debit. If you can automate that process for them, so they can go about their day, they’ll leave having had a far more positive experience.

Chatbots enable customers to signpost their needs, can identify possible solutions and, where required can pass the case directly to a human agent to deal with trickier issues. The chatbot will have gathered the necessary customer information during its customer interaction and can pass that to the human agent so they’re fully briefed on the issue from the moment they take over.

Our Mobile Service Cloud solution contains everything you need to build a customer service chatbot that can do the grunt work for you, freeing up your team to create brilliant opportunities for positive human-to-human interaction. These are the moments that make or break your brand.

In this case, a sign that your automation strategy is paying off might be a reduction in customer service calls, as those with relatively simple queries choose to self-serve on your website or app. That’s time you can use to develop your communication strategy elsewhere.

Dutch energy and communications infrastructure company, Oxxio, identified a need to cultivate more positive interactions with their customers and developed a way to engage them to save energy in a fun and easy way. It’s the delivery of these campaigns that help companies stand apart in a crowded marketplace and promote healthy relationships with current and potential users. Along the way, Oxxio reduced calls to its customer service team by 50%. That gave the team the bandwidth to build an effective customer communications plan.

This time, it’s personal 

Ensuring your communications with existing customers and prospects are personal and relevant will help your customers feel valued and give potential new customers a positive impression of your brand.

If you know enough about your customers, it’s simple enough to do. By creating audience segments, you can create messaging that’s personalised for each segment, ensuring your messaging speaks directly to your audience. Obviously, the more segments you create, the more relevant you can make your message. The key is to work out how much you can realistically achieve and segment your audience to suit.

The data itself is the key, and that’s where you need a powerful Customer Data Platform (or CDP) to store all the data you gather across your numerous customer touchpoints. Once you have that data stored in your CDP, you can segment it in myriad ways to create specific audience profiles to market to.   

For example, you could alert customers of unusual usage levels, or work with erratic payers to give them more settlement options. All of this creates a healthier relationship and increases the likelihood of customer advocacy.

You can find out more about creating superior customer relationships in utilities here.

Get in touch

There’s no doubt that creating effective, positive relationships with consumers in the utilities sector is a challenge, but if you’re looking for some help, CM.com offers comprehensive solutions for personalised, relevant communications, reaching your customers on their favourite channels. Get in touch today to see how we can help.