November 10, 2023
Background
As the supplier of two essential services, providing drinking water and wastewater handling, the organisation already knew how crucial it was to provide a seamless customer journey. The starting point for this work was a complaint was made regarding their social tariff, which is designed to enhance accessibility and affordability of water services to vulnerable customers.
The customer in question had slipped between gaps in the process and senior leadership were keen to investigate how widespread these issues were among their customer base and how the process might be improved to ensure no other customers had the same experience. The customer complaints surrounding this tariff revealed that the service they were receiving was disjointed, and often meant they were waiting too long to be put onto the tariff they qualified for or were having recurring issues getting it set up.
Davies was brought in to recommend the best course of action for further diagnosing the issue specifics and identifying the scale of the problem related to the social tariff. This was done with a view to improving vulnerable customer satisfaction.
How we helped
Our Davies experts were already engaged with this client through our Managed Analytics service, which ensured that the latest technology was available to help to understand this situation.
The technology was able to quickly find examples of the problem by filtering the results for language consistent with the specific offering for vulnerable customers. From this, the client was able to identify that some of their call agents were following the incorrect process with regards to meter application associated with the tariff.
This sparked a larger-scale, end-to-end investigation with their internal stakeholders to identify the customer service issues and create actions that will help to streamline this key service. By improving the communication links through the business, the water company were able to ensure that their vulnerable customers had a smooth and timely journey onto the right tariff for them.
Results
The work that Davies and their client put into this project has seen many improvements within the organisation so far. Not only has the client seen a significant decline in customer complaints, but they’ve also been able to be proactive and put measures in place that will ensure customers can move onto this tariff with minimal effort or disruption, whilst doing all that is possible to simplify billing for these customers —something that was a priority for them going into this project, specifically as their vulnerable customers may struggle financially.
They have also been able to retrospectively review cases at speed and ensure that any appropriate remediations were put in place. Thanks to the speech technology tool implemented, the time needed to identify and investigate these cases has fallen from over 14 days, down to just one.
The client has also reported an improvement in several areas that were previously problematic for them. For example, by following the improved process, the call agents have significantly decreased the time needed to handle customer queries and chase contacts. Their efficient handling of previous issues has already seen an overall decrease in the number of written and non-written customer complaints.
Can we help you?
If you need help in identifying or understanding hard to find scenarios or want to learn more about how to support Vulnerable Customers with Speech analytics technology, contact us.
