Building customer relationships is all about establishing trust

At Utility Week’s Customer Summit we learnt that trust is the essential ingredient, whether it is to help utilities effect the energy transition or just get the right help to those most in need of it.

As the UK looks forward to hosting the COP26 climate change summit in November this year, there is growing public and political debate about the role that citizens and individuals could or should be prepared to play in humanity’s response to the climate crisis.

Utilities have a central role to play in enabling consumers to take on this mantle – to implement energy-efficiency measures, adapt their behaviours and moderate their consumption in ways that will help us all achieve a more sustainable society in the future. And to do this in a way that is cost-effective and inclusive.

But do utilities’ customers trust them to fulfil this role with integrity? This was the nub of debate at Utility Week’s Customer Summit 2021 – sponsored by Genesys Connect, Localz, SEW, and Verint – where energy and water sector leaders came together to discuss the best strategies and necessary building blocks for capitalising on the opportunities entailed in the UK’s green industrial revolution and its net zero vision.

Across the two-day conference, the theme of trust and its centrality to defining the success or failure of utilities to adapt for a net zero future resonated strongly. Whether companies want to justify the cost of infrastructure investments, offer installation of low carbon heating and energy efficiency measures or sell smart home and electric vehicle services, trust in their legitimacy as agents of climate combat will be the key, our speakers agreed.

These pages capture a few highlights from the event, but full recordings of all presentations are available to review on demand – free to conference delegates and available to purchase for those who were unable to attend. Click here to find out more

Yorkshire Water puts purpose first

A key highlight of Utility Week’s Customer Summit was undoubtedly the presentation delivered by Yorkshire Water’s CEO Liz Barber, who explained the water company’s recent journey to a new appreciation of its fundamental purpose and how this has influenced the way it thinks about creating value for customers in the round.

Barber said this transformation had been accelerated by the pandemic but had started much earlier in response to the public debate about nationalisation spurred by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Barber described how that debate had caused Yorkshire “to dig deep” to revisit what customers really wanted. Through an intensive process of engagement and consultation it found that a focus on traditional customer service was too narrow. The regulatory framework drives companies to target conventional “outcomes and outputs”, but this does not satisfy the rising expectations of customers who might simultaneously be described as “consumers” and “citizens”.

Customers – who might be categorised as people who call into contact centres or receive bills – need a company that is good at all the fundamentals of customer service, like easy to access service channels, clear journeys to issue resolution and a low cost of service. But consumers and citizens require other qualities too.

Consumers need a quality product they trust, and citizens require a company committed to creating a positive impact on their environment and quality of life.

To deliver on those citizen expectations, Barber explained that Yorkshire had adopted an “anchor institution” model, which has changed the lens through which it views its purpose and the purpose of its investments.

She said it was an approach that allows for a clearer appreciation of issues like inter-generational fairness and how to manage trade-offs between the cost of investment today and the “cost of failure” to citizens and communities in the future – a conundrum that has recently proved a high-profile point of contention in price reviews for both energy and water utilities.

Keen to demonstrate that Yorkshire’s adoption of the anchor institution model amounts to more than a change in corporate language, Barber pinpointed practical ways in which it has changed the company’s approach to investment and the way it aligns these investments with the strategies of key partners like local authorities, educational institutions and other utilities.

A simple example was the work it is now doing to align operational activities with Northern Gas Networks to minimise disruption and environmental impact. In future, Barber said, this alignment might go further – perhaps including the sharing of assets and even people. She described how this might create citizen value, as well as potentially unlocking tangible efficiency benefits.

To allow utilities to do more in this vein, she called for better alignment of regulatory frameworks so that investment cycles across various interacting parties could be more easily harmonised. With this in place, it would be easier for utilities to deliver “the right investment, at the right time. Not just for the benefit of customers, but for consumers and citizens too”, she said.

Protecting the vulnerable

Consumer vulnerability has swelled with every passing month of the coronavirus pandemic and has driven bereavement, financial hardship and mental health pressures. Utilities need to ensure they respond intelligently to deliver effective support and sustain customer trust, agreed speakers in a dedicated session at the Customer Summit, chaired by Utility Week reporter Adam John.

Service providers across sectors are struggling to respond effectively to the rising proportion of their customers experiencing vulnerability of one sort or another. As ever, experts in the field agree the key to getting the response right lies in truly understanding what support customers need, and this depends on detailed interrogation of myriad forms of data.

Bringing a view from beyond the utilities sector, Alison Jaap, customer director at challenger bank First Direct, said the company had been working hard on adapting its approach to data segmentation to tailor its interactions and services for vulnerable and non-vulnerable customers.

“That is giving us incredible insight into what those customers want,” she said. By the end of the year, she added, it should also underpin a significant improvement in the bank’s ability to identify emerging signs of vulnerability in customers and get ahead of extreme situations.

Building on this theme, Anglian Water’s Samantha Ross shared how it has applied speech analytics to mine call centre recordings for information about the most common forms of vulnerability which present in the roughly 21,000 phone contacts its agents pick up every week.

In recent months the water company has found that around 14 per cent of the calls it receives include some form of vulnerability disclosure, with 25 per cent of these mentioning bereavement. In response, Ross said Anglian had introduced a dedicated bereavement line to prioritise calls.

Responding to vulnerable customers effectively has always been a challenge for utilities. But in the wake of the pandemic that challenge has taken on a new scale which is pushing companies to look again at the ways in which digital innovation, intelligent use of data and partnerships can allow them to manage rising pressures on their resources.

Consumer protections must be safeguarded

As utilities leaders discussed the challenges and opportunities for their organisations in a net zero future, a key area of concern was that new services and markets will create new forms of inequality and customer detriment.

Ed Dodman, head of regulatory affairs at Ombudsman Services, and Gillian Cooper, head of energy policy at Citizens Advice, both said this was a worry for their organisations and that they were working with government and regulators to ensure appropriate protections and redress routes were available in future.

Dodman said an area of interest for the Ombudsman is electric vehicle services, where there is currently no clear pathway for a dissatisfied or troubled customer to resolve situations where they feel they have been treated unfairly.

Meanwhile, Cooper pinpointed Citizens Advice’s call for a Net Zero Homes Guarantee as an example of its work to ensure our net zero future includes appropriate protections for all consumers. With heat decarbonisation an urgent decarbonisation priority, Cooper explained that having a clear approach to informing, supporting, and protecting consumers as they make choices about changing their heating options is critical, echoing comments made by other speakers who suggested that a government-backed public information campaign is needed to engage consumers in their net zero role.

“If we’re going to get this [transition] right for people,” said Cooper, “we need to spend as much time designing the right customer journeys as we do designing the right incentives for companies or how we pay for infrastructure. Because without the support and buy-in of everyone in this country, there won’t be a net zero transition.”