CX has of course been at the forefront of the minds of big businesses since the dawn of time, with most – if not all – citing good customer experience as the reason behind their success. Bad CX, after all, results in poor feedback, lack of loyalty and essentially a tsunami of customers flocking to competitors, costing companies a substantial amount of money. But the CX game is one that’s ever changing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. With that in mind, CX Today welcomes Alex Williams, Head of Customer Contact Centre, UK Power Networks, to discuss with us what makes a top CSAT score and what CX means to him.
“Customer satisfaction was a top priority for us long before the pandemic,” Williams begins.
“Organisations like UK Power Networks are both incentivised and penalised financially based on customer satisfaction scores, so as an industry we’re constantly trying to push the boundaries of what’s possible to deliver a better service. Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) are in essence a competitive metric in the industry, which is undoubtedly a positive thing for customers.”
He adds that every year there are more challenges to face in maintaining and achieving CSAT scores, regardless of the patterns of behaviours caused by the pandemic. Though with UKPN’s CSAT score a solid 93 in 2021, to say they’re providing the very best CX is an understatement. This, Williams explains, is down to ever changing consumer attitudes, but the pandemic didn’t help matters. But Content Guru’s storm solution made remote working for their live agents a million times easier.
“Before the pandemic, we had a traditional contact centre setup. Only around 40 of our 300 agents had the ability to work remotely. We had to mobilise remote agents quickly to maintain service levels for customers.
“With the Content Guru storm solution, this was more of a hardware challenge than anything else – sourcing laptops for agents to work from. The storm cloud platform meant that once we had the hardware in place, agents could work remotely very quickly, and the customer experience transition was a smooth one.”
What makes Content Guru’s award-winning storm CCaaS solution special is that it now seamlessly integrates with Teams, thus enabling an organisation’s front-office contact centre users to effortlessly transfer callers through storm to back-office subject matter experts on Teams.
With live availability status, front-office employees have full visibility of their back-office colleagues, with real-time presence synchronisation across both systems. The process works effectively in both directions for a seamless, unified environment.
The solution has essentially given businesses back control at a time when many have felt like they’ve had none whatsoever. And for UKPN, who are penalised on their CSAT scores, control over their CX offering is vital, as Williams explains.
“What surprised us was that customer satisfaction scores actually increased during the pandemic. Particularly during the first few months, we saw a lot of goodwill towards our agents as key workers. At a time when most other companies were providing limited contact services, the fact that we were able to maintain the same 24-hour service as before with no interruptions was received very well by customers. We couldn’t have maintained or improved that without Content Guru’s cloud solution.”
Williams adds the shift to storm was seamless, and a huge benefit to both customers and to agent wellbeing during such a challenging period.
He adds: “Agent wellbeing is just as crucial to customer satisfaction as any other aspect. We recognise that only by ensuring our staff are happy, supported and engaged can we guarantee the very best service levels. During the pandemic, this paid dividends and we actually saw a reduction in absence levels. Now, we have a more flexible hybrid approach. Around 80% of staff work from home, with the remaining requesting to work from the office. This flexibility has brought our absence levels down to around 4%, which is extremely good in the contact centre industry and is driven entirely by an engaged workforce.”
This also means UKPN has been able to maintain our 3-star rating and score of 774 in the Sunday Times Top 30 Large Companies to Work For, which is of course extremely impressive. But what does CSAT mean to Williams?
“Customer satisfaction is core to everything we do. The role of a distribution network operator goes far beyond simply ‘keeping the lights on’ – whether that’s maintaining critical, sometimes lifesaving services, or making sure vulnerable customers the peace of mind in the services we deliver.”
