U.K. utilities leader cuts customer effort by 78% through unified data and analytics
The goal
To analyze existing operations for identifying and acting on opportunities for driving measurable improvements in customer experience delivery and contact center efficiency.
The outcome
78%
reduction in customer effort
21.5%
decrease in email volumes
100
seconds AHT improvement
64.2%
drop in absenteeism
The challenge
Our client is a multinational utilities company whose activities include electricity generation and distribution. It was experiencing several operational pain points that were beginning to impact the quality and consistency of its customer experience delivery within the U.K.
Due to fragmented data sources, which were preventing it from capturing and operationalizing actionable insights, it was unable to accurately identify root causes of issues or take remedial steps to improve service delivery. What’s more, these inefficiencies were increasing agent workloads and lowering their productivity.
As such, the client needed the means of capturing and analyzing all the data at its disposal and to use the findings to drive targeted improvement initiatives aimed at reducing customer effort, increasing first contact resolution, lowering average handle times and giving its contact center teams the insights required for accurate forecasting and resource management.
The solution
Service delivered onshore in the U.K.
Industry
Utilities
Channels
Voice and email
Languages
English
Foundever and the client’s stakeholders began a multidisciplinary discovery phase to identify key friction points. From there, Foundever’s data and reporting, insights and analytics, and continuous improvement experts built a unified data model, drawing together omnichannel, CRM, telephony, and adviser performance data. This gave full customer journey visibility and generated the volume and quality of data needed for root cause analysis and the development of targeted improvement initiatives.
These improvement initiatives spanned several areas, including:
- IVR design to reduce customer effort and call abandonment rates
- Email templates to enable simpler, consistent communication
- Process redesign for two time-consuming processes: a customer providing or verifying an electric meter reading and reporting a change of address
- Case management tools to streamline advisory workflows
A single unified data source and better tools for managing operations enabled the integration of real-time Power BI dashboards. These gave the client visibility over critical metrics such as AHT and repeat contacts, while allowing all parties to monitor, refine, and fine-tune improvement initiatives using employee and customer feedback.
Results
78%
reduction in customer effort
21.5%
decrease in email volumes
100
seconds AHT improvement
64.2%
drop in absenteeism
The IVR redesign significantly reduced customer friction, lowering customer effort by 78% and reducing average time spent navigating the system by 100 seconds.
Changes to critical processes cut the time it typically took a customer to verify or provide an electric meter reading from 24 days and multiple contacts and touchpoints to a single 11-minute phone call.
The introduction of email templates enhanced message clarity and the consistency of communication, which enabled faster interactions with customers and critically reduced the number of repeat contacts. The templates were supported by enhanced agent coaching and improvements to the CRM system, which provided agents with a full view of the customer history. Together, these improvements drove a 9% reduction in average email handling time, a 67% decrease in wrap-up time and a 21.5% decrease in email interactions as fewer customers needed to send multiple emails to resolve an issue or receive requested information.