Cutting operating costs by 40% and increasing customer satisfaction by 20% for a UK energy provider
31 March 2022
How can you restore the share price and customer satisfaction at the same time?
Following a recent customer care and billing systems implementation, one of the big six UK energy companies was having difficulty accurately billing their customers. Their underpinning algorithms were generating spurious figures, and when confused people rang up to enquire, customer care operators were unable to provide satisfactory explanations. That’s if customers got through at all. While the company was hiring thousands more people to staff the phones, their digital foundations had to be fixed before any real progress could be made.
Tasked to help rescue the business, the Baringa team arrived at scenes of extreme pressure. The scale of the problem was suffocating the business and both customer satisfaction and share price were in steep decline. Our team had to go into overdrive and work relentlessly to help turn things around.
Quietening the storm
Short of silver bullets, we had dozens and dozens of issues to quickly get our heads round before putting structure and rigor in place to fix them all in a sensible, methodical but fast way and affect overall change. But we did it. We did it over a testing and prolonged timeframe, but we’re proud to say the business was saved.
How did we do it? We went through the algorithms, identified what was going wrong and corrected those errors so that the system generated sensible answers that the customer could recognise and understand. This consequently led to fewer customers contacting our client. However, for those who did want to get in touch, we improved the interactive voice response to better address online enquiries - a technology supported by robot automation that we created to run scripts in the background to fix data issues as they arose.
A rise in customer satisfaction, share price, and satisfaction and data
The industry measure that ranks companies’ customer satisfaction went back up, and so did the client’s own internal customer satisfaction-metrics. As they climbed the league tables, the share price was restored too. But also – as an additional benefit - with improved underpinnings, our client can now better understand their own customer data.
"David Hatcher and the team from Baringa were instrumental in the turnaround of the business. There is no way we would have achieved what we did without them. They way how they really got stuck in to help us through some pretty stressful times was outstanding."
Client COO
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