Company: ScottishPower
Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing)
Community:
https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople
https://twitter.com/ScottishPower
https://www.facebook.com/ScottishPower
Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
ScottishPower supplies energy to over 5 million homes and businesses in the UK, as part of the Iberdrola Group, a global energy company and world leader in wind energy.
As the number one European utility by market capitalisation we are helping to change the energy market for the better, driving innovation from the way we generate and supply energy to how we interact with our staff and customers.
Social Media is at the heart of our strategic growth and our constant drive to be an Energy company you would be happy to recommend to friends and family.
Our customer satisfaction initiatives: 360o Customer View
During 2015, we faced a challenge in managing the perception and reputation of our customer service after a sustained period of instability post implementation of a new Billing and CRM system. Prior to this, our Social Media landscape was a healthy and vibrant small community of engaged advocates. This community rapidly grew and became steadily more negative as customer service complaints and media focus increased. With only two full-time staff operating during business hours our situation quickly became unmanageable and added to the negative perception around ScottishPower at the time.
Faced with this challenge, we conceived, developed and began implementation of our Customer 360O program focusing on re-engaging with customers and improving satisfaction and reputation scores. Central to this was bringing social media closer to our tradition customer touch points with a truly Omni-channel approach to service. In delivering this approach, we embarked on three key social initiatives utilising LSW to deliver a truly exceptional Social Customer Care experience.
- Filter out the noise: Utilise LSW tags and routing to allow our small customer service team to focus on real customer engagements
- Prioritise those who need help the most: Energy is an important part of our daily lives. Utilising priority rules in LSW we have refined key word routing to ensure when someone loses their electricity supply or are a vulnerable customer we are able to intervene quickly to help.
- Reducing repeat contacts: From social listening, we identified a pool of repeat customers. Using LSW we have been able to revise and resolve issues through improved end-2-end case management to minimise the reputational damage from serial dissenters.
The most important customer issues we were looking to solve via Lithium implementation
Focusing on delivering excellent customer service on social
We have always had a proud history in delivering exceptional service to our customer and that had been impacted somewhat by the migration to our new billing system. Through social it was important that we re-engaged with our customers and restored their confidence in ScottishPower as their energy provider.
By embarking on the Customer 3600 project, we have been able to improve our customer service performance on social dramatically. LSW has been central to this strategy and has provided the platform to re-engage with our customers and restore confidence in our brand. Through the metrics that we track regularly we have seen a significant improvement and with a 13 point improvement in our social sentiment post LSW implementation it is clear that our customers are also seeing the benefits of our enhanced social service.
The robustness and confidence we have been able to install in our team since implementing LSW led us to re-open and cleanse over 2.5k pervious social service cases reducing our repeat contacts by 30% and restore faith in previously dissatisfied customers.
Due to our increased focus on measurement and performance management, we have now extended our coverage to 24/7 and our team has trebled in size. Internally Social First is our new approach with Monitor Wall visible in key departments such as THE Digital Innovations team, Customer Services and shared with all appropriate C-Suite leaders.
Making it easier to do business with us
In-depth routing and reporting capabilities have allowed us to focus on the root cause issues to drive service improvement. As such, we are now able to embark on a pro-active engagement campaign to educate and help consumers and reduce the need for them to individually contact us.
Metrics
- Positive and neutral sentiment improved from 77% pre Lithium to 90% post Lithium
- Repeat social complaints reduced by 30%
- Average response time for Priority 1 cases reduced from 1 hour to 20 minutes.
- 80% of mentions responded to in less than 1 hour with 98% within 2 hours.
- 200 repeat customer cases fully reworked and helped through re-engagement using Lithium
- Recent Independent Industry benchmarking by Social Bakers showed we had the 2nd highest number of service engagement in the industry (highest of the major suppliers by customer base) yet the fastest response rate of all suppliers
- Overall Customer Satisfaction scores are improving with the percentage of Very Satisfied increasing by 20 percentage points over the last 6 months
