Interview: Anthony Ainsworth, marketing director, Eon

“We hired actors to pose as protesters. They burst into the meeting, shouting and throwing water. People thought: ‘Is this how they see us?’”

Anthony Ainsworth’s CV is intriguingly unique and, without doubt, a conspicuously alien feature in the UK’s energy supply industry.

It’s perhaps fitting, therefore, that he talks to me about the road that led him to Eon at the poolside of a smart Miami hotel, the venue for a software conference where Ainsworth is speaking about customer engagement and rebuilding trust. It’s a world away from the hubbub accompanying the first findings from the CMA inquiry into the embattled UK energy market.

Here, the locals are cowering inside on what is a cold day for Florida. But it’s sunny, we Brits are made of sterner stuff, and I’m keen to hear a particular story from Ainsworth’s eclectic career. Rumour has it he once spent a day as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodyguard.

He grins and nods confirmation. “It was while I was working for Rank Group in the late 1990s,” Ainsworth explains. Rank is the gaming and entertainment business that part-owns Universal Studios’ theme parks in the US as well as the Hard Rock Cafe franchise.

“There was a groundbreaking ceremony for a new investment in Japan and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the guest of honour. I was the only other person who spoke English on site so I was elected his chaperone for the day. It was great. I wanted to have my picture taken with him at the end but they wouldn’t let me because I’m about four inches taller and he’d been paid a fortune to be there and be larger than life.”

Ainsworth says that experience was “part of another world” – a career that took him to work at locations including the Bahamas, New Jersey and China to name but a few. And now he’s a director at Eon, based in Coventry, and helping the UK’s second largest electricity generator and third largest supplier by customer numbers claw back a position of trust with UK consumers.

It’s hard to believe given what went before, but Ainsworth insists this position is “exciting”. Perhaps an intervening decade in the retail banking and car hire industries has brought perspective.

Justifying his enthusiasm, Ainsworth describes how he was inspired by the vision of Eon UK chief executive Tony Cocker when he took up his post three years ago during a big shake-up of senior management.

“Tony expressed a real will to change the business; to change the perception of Eon in the UK and even to change the perception of the whole of the energy industry,” recalls Ainsworth. “That really appealed to me. I wanted the challenge of personally making a difference and of being part of a business which made a difference to an industry. They were clearly looking for people from outside to bring in fresh ideas, so it was a good match.”

Ainsworth joined Eon in early 2012 and certainly got the challenge he was looking for. The business was not in a good place. Customer churn was high and its net promoter score (NPS) was minus 30.

Why were things so bad? Ainsworth talks in generic terms about an industry that had “lost its way”, forgetting what it was really there for and becoming too complicated. It’s hard to get him to talk about any specific faults in Eon’s strategy or processes. But he’s clearer on the actions that have been taken to put things right.

First things first, there was a need to get to grips with the reality of customer concerns and the way in which Eon was perceived. When Ainsworth joined Eon, there was an executive team that was used to a world in which “we used to build power stations and people were grateful”.

To get the message across that this was no longer the case, Ainsworth collaborated with a group of change-hungry employees to stage a riot at an internal meeting.

“We hired actors to pose as protesters at a meeting of about two hundred executives. They were very convincing,” says Ainsworth with relish. “They burst in, shouting and throwing water about. No-one knew it was a stunt until right at the end. It had the desired effect. People were really shocked into thinking: ‘Is this how people see us?’”

It was the start of a reorientation of the business that put customer satisfaction targets above financial performance goals for the first time. The new drive, encapsulated in a one-page strategy, has also introduced an independent customer council, which the board reports to each month, and mandated interaction between the board and real customers – domestic and business – in facilitated sessions.

“We used to rely on quantitative insights into customer behaviours and priorities that were presented on pieces of paper. But you also need qualitative insight, given to you direct. That really gets to the heart of what’s going wrong for customers, emotionally as well as logically.”

Getting the right approach to addressing these problems has taken time. Simplification, in particular, is something a big German-owned engineering company has struggled with at times. “We were gaining and losing a million customers each year. Of the million we gained, half left within six months. We knew we had to do something to stop this and so we set up an ‘acquisition journey redesign project’.

“We took the idea to the customer council and they said ‘are you for real? – where’s the customer in all this?’”

Suitably cowed, the change team went away and came up with new project titles which responded to specific customer experience pain points. There are now 11, which include ‘I’m joining’, ‘I’m paying’, ‘I’m moving’ and so on.

Coupled with the introduction of 850,000 smart meters to date and the launch of an online energy-saving tool, these customer satisfaction projects have had a big impact. Churn rate is down and Eon’s NPS is now “into positive territory” – a unique status among the big six, according to Ainsworth.

Importantly too, Eon hasn’t focused on only domestic customers in order to improve its NPS. The business-to-business space, for which Ainsworth is responsible in the UK, has also been critical.

“We may have a lot fewer commercial customers by number, but they generate about 40 per cent of Eon’s profits in the UK and so we must make sure they receive the appropriate level of focus when we’re talking about improving customer satisfaction,” says Ainsworth.

Giving the right focus to B2B customers required internal restructuring, but the move which really got attention and made waves externally was the groundbreaking decision to do away with rollover contract renewals.

“We were sitting down with some of our SME [small and medium-sized enterprise] customers in one of our customer immersion sessions. And they told us that they hated – not disliked, hated – the renewals process, which was fairly standard at the time whereby contracts were automatically renewed  unless a customer cancelled.”

In April last year, Eon stopped the auto rollover of contracts in the B2B market. It has also called on Ofgem to mandate that other suppliers stop it too. “Most of the major suppliers have followed suit in some shape or form. But some of the smaller ones haven’t.”

Straying into the murky waters of industry regulation, Ainsworth continues: “This is one of the areas where having a level playing field with the regulator would be really helpful. There is a role for Ofgem and others to play in helping the market rebuild trust. If everyone stopped auto rollovers, that would be fair and transparent. The other thing we would encourage Ofgem to push hard on is the TPI [third party intermediary] code of practice so that there is transparency there as well.”

While Ainsworth clearly feels that progress on this point is frustratingly slow, he is more complimentary about other actions taken by the regulator to realign the energy industry with the interests of consumers.

He is positive about the CMA inquiry, without expressing any particular views about its approach, and says the four-tariff limit set by the Retail Market Review has genuinely helped Eon simplify and improve its offers to customers.  “It was the right thing to do for the whole industry – to narrow the number of tariffs and make choices simpler,” he says.

Now the industry has to some extent been reset, Ainsworth looks forward to a time when there will once again be “headroom” for the introduction of greater choice. “As we go forward into a world with more smart meters in a smarter energy market with time-of-use products, energy suppliers are going to need more flexibility to be able to respond.”

And if there’s one supplier that knows what it means to flex to fit the demands of a rapidly changing world, it must be Eon. Last year it announced that it would split its business in two to create a traditional generation and trading business and a customer-facing renewables and smart technology business. It’s been called the biggest spin-off of all time by some commentators.

“It’s a huge transaction to split a company of our size,” says Ainsworth, and one that is indicative of the unprecedented amount of change in the market – including the change that has been realised in the past few years and the change anticipated in years to come.

The timescale for achieving the split is relatively short considering its magnitude. “By the end of this year we’ll be functioning as different companies with the official separation planned for mid-2016.”

As an accomplished businessman in this environment, it is perhaps a little easier now to understand why Ainsworth describes Eon as an exciting place to work.

But he knows it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. “We in the energy sector and in business find these things exciting because it is our world. But it is not our customers’ world and they still find it all very boring.”

A marketing executive with a background in accounting, Ainsworth is clear that competitive energy markets of the future will be defined by engagement. “Because,” put bluntly, “we want to have deeper relationships with [customers] so they stay with us longer and we can sell them more stuff.”

It’s a “solutions-based” premise for competition that requires “always-on” marketing and support that will stretch and strain a traditional supplier. If it doesn’t, Ainsworth says simply, “you are not trying hard enough.”