When customers can’t solve a problem on their own, utilities pay the price.
A typical utility company (with two million customers) receives two to three million customer service calls annually, costing nearly $20 to $40 million. Most of these calls center around common customer tasks, like confirming a bill, restoring power, setting up service, or updating an account.
These call center experiences are often a lose-lose for customers and employees across the industry. Customers become frustrated with never-ending phone trees that lead to various departments, and service representatives lack the supportive technology for easy-to-manage customer accounts.
A surge in calls, paired with inefficiencies in the call center process, places a significant financial burden on the utility company.
Many utility leaders already know that improving the call center is necessary to improve ROI, but are saddled with outdated and aging technology infrastructure supporting their customer-facing platforms and internal processes.
How can utilities squeeze more value out of the technology they’ve already invested in while building digital experiences that alleviate this outsized burden on call centers?
Unlocking efficiency: The self-service solution
Digitizing the customer journey with a user-centered, logged-in experience gives customers easy access to their most sought-after information, empowering them to resolve issues independently and spend less time on the phone. On the internal side, improving the technology call center employees use (i.e., better dashboards and data retrieval) allows them to resolve customer concerns quickly and lower the average handle time.
By integrating these two experiences into a single platform, customers and employees can seamlessly share real-time data and improve efficiency.
Take a power outage for example:
When the power goes out, a customer logs into their self-service portal to report an issue; through automated information retrievals, the customer sees an updated status on the estimated time of restoration without ever having to pick up the phone to call customer service.
This seamless communication between systems reduces the need for follow-up calls, taking pressure off the call center employees and improving customer satisfaction by keeping them informed.
Decreasing call center volume by 10% — Avangrid’s user-centered transformation
Prominent utility company Avangrid noticed significant challenges with its customer experience, leading directly to high operational costs. Customers often needed to call multiple times to activate a service, and over half implied they had never visited the company’s website.
The company turned to Blink to reevaluate its customer and employee experiences and revamp the processes underpinning the high call center costs. With in-depth user research, employee interviews, and process mapping, we found key inefficiencies in the internal workflow: manual tasking, back-and-forth communication between siloed teams, and error-prone technical limitations.
To better serve customers, Blink created personalized and responsive mobile and web experiences that allow customers to complete tasks in 10 minutes or less. We also provided a strategic roadmap for technological upgrades and a new marketing strategy to increase awareness around their new digital solutions.
Less than a year after launching these improvements for just one channel in one user journey, Avangrid saw a 10% decrease in call center costs, and a 30% increase in app utilization, with 85% eBill adoption and automated account setup.
Getting started: How to improve experiences and kickstart savings
Digital transformation is unique for each company, depending on the maturity of its current self-service and internal systems. To pinpoint the best opportunities for self-service, consider three key aspects: At what point in the customer journey are customers calling the most (e.g., account changes, payment issues, or outages), and which of these has the highest handling time and lowest IVR containment?
Leaders should prioritize improvements by identifying which parts of their tech stack are likely to break and impact crucial customer interactions. At the same time, implementation teams can also improve operational efficiency in areas unhindered by technology limitations through tools like design systems, customer-centered thinking, and better omnichannel communication.
By improving the experiences that matter most to customers, utilities can build trust, increase customer satisfaction, and lower business overhead costs.