The introduction of customer & developer measures of experience (CMeX & DMeX) has made it essential for water companies to keep customer service at the top of their agenda. With this new scoring in place, businesses with high scores can reap the rewards, but those with low scores may find themselves penalised – with an eye-watering £20m penalty for the largest companies.

If you’re a water company wondering how to avoid these fines, you need to do one thing: improve your customer experience (CX). Not only will excellent CX help you keep on top of those scores, but it’s also likely to have a positive impact on your employee experience and overall business performance.

We breakdown four ways to improve your CMeX & DMeX scores.

Tap into your customer data

You only have to look at the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify to see that unlocking customer data is the key to great CX. Clever businesses are using their data to help identify and understand the root cause of customer issues – and then take action fast. The latest OFWAT shadow year report showed that most customer queries were in relation to a recent, or planned move, making a payment, or reporting a blockage.

For example: if a customer is calling about a move, or to make a payment – ask yourself: could this be automated? How can we make that journey easier for the customer? Are we using customer surveys to capture more insight on CX issues? These are just some of the ways you can improve CX and get vital information from customers that can help you shake up the status quo and be more innovative with your CX.

Monitor your customer contacts

Checking just a sample of contacts only gives you a slice of the insight – but you need the whole pie. Monitoring contacts can be a time-consuming task, driven by how the quality assurance (QA) team perceives the call. You need to automate the process, so you are reviewing 100% of your interactions, efficiently. This can be done by using speech and text analytics to score your contacts and provide an overall insight of how your agents are treating your customers.

During a recent roundtable discussion with some of our clients using speech analytics, they shared how they were shocked at some of the calls taking place – and can now make a real difference to CX by discovering which colleagues in certain areas were delivering a poor customer service. In addition, it revealed how certain KPI’s were delivering unintended consequences.

Understand the customer journey from beginning to end

Mapping the end-to-end customer journey helps to break down departmental silos and helps you spot the impact that one area of the business may be having on another. In addition to understanding the journey your customer goes on, you can spot any opportunity for operational improvements such as streamlining working processes, tightening up on compliance and utilising automation. Improving these areas can give your employees more time to deliver a memorable customer service that can bump up your CMeX and DMeX scores.

Cultural change that actually makes a mark

Changing the culture in any business can be like wading through treacle. Where do you start? And how can you make actual change happen? Whether they realise it or not, everyone in your business has some level of impact on the customer, even if they are not directly customer facing – and it’s the job of your organisation’s leaders to help employees buy into the values and understand the role they play. Creating a customer-centric culture can be achieved with employee engagement programmes, KPIs, learning and development strategies and by making valuable process improvements.

The OFWAT report discovered that two of the top points made by customers was the limitation of choice in supplier and value for money. And with these two things not so easy to change, it’s worth asking yourself how you could improve your customer journey, so that the customers didn’t mind that they didn’t have a choice? The challenge for your business is to provide a service, and CX, that would make those customers pick you even if they did have a choice. Perhaps that’s something to take into 2022?

If you are looking for some advice on how to boost your CMex & DMeX scores, or improve CX generally, please get in touch – we’d love to chat.

Lee Mostari
Director of Insight and Analytics
Davies

E: lee.mostari@davies-group.com
L: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leemostari/