I am the customer: Mark K Smith

“Be channel agnostic to ­engage with customers”

Five years ago, many of us were familiar with the following scenario: having taken the day off work to wait for an engineer to fix the boiler, the knock on the door never arrived. You wasted a day’s holiday, and had to go through it again. Thankfully, many utility companies have made enormous progress in this area, giving customers specific time slots and advanced notice of delays. But there is so much more to do.

The trick now is to communicate with customers that are too busy to talk, forgetful, unavailable or just lack a way of regularly communicating. How? By learning from each interaction. Each one teaches us something new about the customer and how they like to be contacted: the best time, best day, best channel, best wording, best tone.

Your approach might be an email, app, SMS, mobile optimised website, tweet, or instant messenger system such as ­WhatsApp. But you can’t rely on just one or two channels; an email can be lost, downloading an app is a pain, texting to a switched off mobile won’t work, websites go down, and instant messengers can get swamped in other noise. The key is to plan for a reply, be channel agnostic and move across channels if no response is forthcoming.

By having a dialogue – and not monologue – with customers, utilities can reduce missed appointments and wasted truck rolls, leading to carbon and financial efficiencies. And with industry customer churn rates at 12-15 per cent, what better way to engage properly with customers?

Mark K Smith, chief executive, Contact Engine