Finding self-service success

Challenge

UK energy suppliers aren’t just competing on price. Facing unprecedented competition — and with 20% of their customers switching suppliers every month — they’re also competing on customer experience. And because average profitability is only 2% in the sector, it’s clear these energy companies need to do more with less. They need to be better, faster and, ultimately, cheaper.

Utilita has invested in market-leading technology to give its prepay customers an entirely new way to use and pay for energy — providing numerous choices and digital access, including the award-winning MyUtilita app. Because customer touchpoints are more frequent with prepay energy, call volumes are invariably higher than those traditional energy providers experience. And, while most prepay queries tend to be routine questions, some customers need a reassuring agent who has the time and resources to help. At Utilita, a dedicated Extra Care Team handles these sensitive inquiries.

Understanding the frustrations customers face when waiting for a call to be answered, Utilita turned to Genesys to speed up the process and provide its customers with a superior experience.

Solution

As its customer base grew, Utilita opted to implement Genesys DX to answer its growing number of queries. The implementation emphasised self-service, which saves significant money in call handling while empowering customers. With a track record of enhancing customer experiences and increasing deflection, Genesys DX also provides greater flexibility in the configuration of routing and resourcing functionality — a must for any fast-growing company.

“As an independent energy company, we move quickly and need to adapt to the needs of our customers during what can be some really hard times. The Genesys DX platform is so incredibly easy to use, which has allowed us to reduce the time it takes to feed the chatbot with the necessary information, speeding up the delivery to our customers,” said Martin Filler, Head of Contact Centre at Utilita.

“Having implemented chatbots previously, we saw a real difference in how Genesys DX approached the initial scoping stages — starting not with what we wanted, but what was really driving our customers to contact us,” added Filler. “This novel approach and the ability of Genesys to implement the system quickly was attractive.”

Genesys DX chatbots enable the customer service team to handle complex tasks more effectively while supporting users who need accurate answers quickly. They are able to:

• Answer growing customer queries
• Continuously analyse questions to understand customer needs
• Provide customers with accurate answers — fast

Results

Since the Utilita chatbot launched, Genesys DX has delivered huge value by supporting customer queries at a much faster rate. Over the first 10 months, the chatbot has received more than 1 million engagements and is delivering a self-service score of 87.3%. Because the cost to fulfill a chatbot inquiry is minimal — a matter of pennies compared to several dollars for a phone call — the savings is clear. The benefits have been significant to both Utilita and its customer service team.

Through close monitoring of the intuitive Genesys DX dashboard, any questions that the chatbot isn’t answering sufficiently are flagged. This allows a dedicated team to provide answers or solutions, which the chatbot can then deliver within minutes.

“The Genesys DX dashboard enables our team to easily identify questions that might require some additional web functionality,” said Filler. “After seeing a trend for people asking for their passwords to be reset, we decided to improve self-service options for this journey and improve automation. This observation has enabled over 20,000 customers, who have since asked the same question via the chatbot, to self-serve — saving thousands in call handling.”

“The chatbot has clearly become the communication mode of choice for many, especially those in the younger, digital-native demographic,” concluded Filler.