Utilities

With price comparison engines and switching services making it far easier for people to find the most competitive tariffs, customer experience is proving a critical differentiator for today’s utility companies

Utility firms also face significant pressure from their industry regulators to perform against their customer service objectives. In the water sector, Ofwat’s SIM Service Incentive Mechanism ranks providers from top to bottom, while power regulator Ofgem can fine those suppliers that consistently fail to deliver when in comes to explaining contracts, billing and handling complaints.

Today’s highest performing utilities recognise that delivering a high-quality customer experience now needs to range beyond the contact centre, embracing all aspects of a customer’s engagement with the organisation. Consequently, best practice CX requires a clear focus on optimising the end-to-end customer journey, with key challenges including:

Addressing industry regulatory monitoring of customer service activities – such as Ofwat’s SIM Service Incentive Mechanism and Ofgem’s customer satisfaction rankings
Ensure compliance with key FCA financial selling and GDPR data protection
regulations
Optimise customer engagement activity costs, striking the right balance between
excellent customer experience and cost-effective service provision
Leverage CX as a differentiator to compete with low-cost market entrants
Address customer frustration by removing any friction from cross-channel journeys
Successfully introduce and integrate automation to encourage self-service, while streamlining processes that disrupt customer journeys

HomeServe works with Sabio on major speech analytics deployment

Operating as HomeServe’s specialist contact centre technology partner, Sabio has helped the company deploy speech analytics to mine millions of customer interactions and identify process improvements that deliver CX benefits such as significantly reduced hold times

Water companies engage Sabio for telephony data insight

Sabio supports four of the UK’s leading water companies – Thames Water, Southern Water, South West Water and Northumbrian Water – supporting their sales, marketing and operations teams with detailed insight into potential customer service barriers and hotspots.

Identifying cost-free marketing savings for British Gas

Working with the British Gas customer acquisitions team, Sabio’s Rapport out of hours analysis service helped identify abandoned calls at an outsourcer, leading directly to six-figure savings.

Delivering solutions for leading organisations such as HomeServe, Thames Water and British Gas, Sabio is an ideal CX technology partner for utility firms. Key Sabio propositions for this sector include:

Proven expertise in delivering award-winning banking contact centre systems
Digital and Contact Centre Customer Journey Mapping
Continuous customer feedback processes to help utilities stay ahead of regulatory regimes such as SIM
Full Voice of the Customer support, with benchmarking against sector best practice, CX feedback and employee engagement feedback
Rapport Insights Service targeting the most problematic 20% of customer
experiences that typically don’t reach the contact centre
Secure conversational front-end solutions for digital engagement, with embedded account authentication and contact centre integration
Comprehensive hosted omnichannel contact centre infrastructure solutions
available via Sabio’s proven assured performance model
Full suite of Workforce Optimisation capabilities to improve contact centre
operational efficiency

Delivering an improved utilities customer experience with Sabio