EDF looks ahead to a post-pandemic future

As England eases some of the restrictions brought in as part of the lockdown, companies are beginning to assess their business priorities going forward, namely how they will operate in a post-lockdown economy. Philippe Commaret, EDF’s retail managing director, tells Utility Week about his company’s plans to rebuild trust with customers and what he sees as way forward with flexible home working patterns.

Following the prime minister’s announcement that England was beginning to ease some lockdown measures, millions of people are beginning to see a miniscule speck of light at the end of a very uncertain tunnel. For the energy retail sector, the focus is shifting towards the new normal and how the industry will work in a post-lockdown world.

Despite the difficult road ahead for the country, EDF Energy’s managing director of customers strikes an optimistic tone as he speaks to Utility Week. Philippe Commaret and EDF are already looking ahead to the future. For the Frenchman, it boils down to rebuilding trust with consumers.

“We have a duty to reinvent the relationship with our customers, because this crisis has meant that the relationship between customers with any type of business has vanished. I think there is an appetite for a large share of customers to have a much more digitised relationship. This relationship will probably need to be more proactive towards the most vulnerable customers in order to give them more bespoke advice to control their energy consumption, their bills and also find solutions when they are struggling to pay.”

Commaret joined the UK business from EDF in France, where he worked as director of sales, in December last year. He was previously director general of ÉS Énergies Strasbourg, part of a majority-owned subsidiary of EDF Group.

He says EDF Energy, which has almost 5 million customers, has already seen signs of this shifting relationship with consumers. To that end, 80 per cent of customer transactions during the crisis have been online – a 5.4 per cent increase. Furthermore, he says, encouraging all customers to “self-serve” online has been very effective.

“We have launched a dedicated Covid-19 FAQ on our website and there has been more than 120,000 logs on these pages since we launched, it’s huge. The other shift that we have seen is that the rest of our customer base has moved to our digital tools. We have seen that during this period of time nearly 80 per cent of the transactions we had with customers were achieved online. We have more than 10,000 customers who have downloaded our app, we have seen 250,000 registering to their account on their desktop.”

Since the beginning of April, EDF has given financial assistance to more than 70,000 customers, a figure much higher that it had anticipated. To help identify those in need, the supplier put in place detection methods in its call centres in order to prioritise the most vulnerable.

He adds: “We do not just answer the questions, we have tried to be proactive. We try to segment, amongst the vulnerable customers – the ones who may face the most anxiety – and we are contacting them by phone and seeing if they need any kind of assistance. As an example on the SME customer segment, we try to call each customer that’s cancelled their direct debit in order to better understand the situation of their business, to give advice and to present the different schemes that the government has put in place. We have set up a hardship fund to give a discretionary amount of money to pre-payment customers and for the time being we have distributed around £1 million through the fund.”

Flexible home working – a new normal?

While Commaret begins to focus on the tasks ahead, like other organisations, EDF Energy has had to adapt its way of working in light of the government lockdown measures. The shift to home working for many of its employees has the managing director looking ahead and pondering the prospect of more flexible working patterns even after the lockdown is lifted.

“At the beginning of the crisis we not only paused the field force activity but we also made sure that everybody was able to work remotely. I think that we have benefited from this period of time to learn how we can work remotely in a very efficient way. I believe that in our new future, we will introduce a much more flexible way to work in the industry.”

Such an arrangement, says Commaret, will foster a more positive relationship between customers and advisors.

He adds that out of almost 4,000 staff in the UK, 3,200 employees were moved to home working within a matter of days. EDF was quite late in furloughing its staff compared to other companies in the sector. Only 400 out of its 1,200-strong field force have been placed on the government-backed scheme and the company does not plan on furloughing more. That said, its field force has been helping the transition to home working for their counterparts in the retail business.

“The main challenge for our people was to install the laptops and the desktops and rebuild managerial confidence in the way people are working. We have been very successful because it has been a team effort. For example the field force has installed the desktops in the households of advisors. I think that there is a lot of pride across the teams, that this kind of thing was able to be delivered in less than a week.”

A smarter future

Commaret says the company is already reviewing its smart meter installation protocols to ensure engineers stay for as little time as possible in households and to ramp up the amount of cleaning done once the job is complete, in preparation for the time when the stalled rollout can continue. The latest figures across the sector show a 95 per cent decrease in the number of installations in April, as only emergency installations are allowed.

In addition, the firm is looking at ways in which it can safely bring back the furloughed 400 so it can continue with the rollout. For Commaret, not only is his message of winning back consumer confidence necessary for the retail business, it will also be vital to resuming the smart meter project once the pandemic is over. He cites consumer behaviour has being a “key concern”.

“The crisis has shifted the needs of our customers, one of the things that may have impacted customer behaviour is probably their willingness to have someone come to their household to install a device. When you look at surveys by Smart Energy GB for example there is a large proportion of UK citizens that are pretty reluctant at the moment to see someone coming into their household.

“So what we are going to assess in the coming weeks when we will restart the field activities is how much and how fast can we ramp up the field activity. We don’t have the answer yet.”