Gigabit broadband in the UK: government targets and the opportunity for telcos

At the start of the decade, the UK government pledged to make gigabit broadband available across the country by 2025. Although this target has since been revised to 2030, Ofcom reported at the end of last year that 70% of UK households can now access gigabit broadband packages.

But despite the drive from both government and private companies to rollout the infrastructure, uptake from consumers is still slow. Part of the problem is that the gigabit initiative is still ongoing, and many households across the country aren’t aware they can upgrade yet. That’s not helped by a confusing picture of who’s responsible for the rollout, with private telcos, central government and regional authorities all involved at various stages.

But it’s not just gigabit that isn’t being fully embraced. Ofcom’s 2022 Connected Nations report also found that while 97% of UK homes can access 30Mb per second broadband, only 73% actually take it.

As more choices are put before consumers, it becomes harder for them to know which one is the best for them. Telcos have a huge part to play in helping them navigate their options – and a huge opportunity to build more loyalty and trust with their customers as a result. For new ISPs, there’s also a chance to lay down the right customer relationship from the get-go. 

 

Safety and convenience matters just as much as cost 

It’s easy to point fingers at cost or a lack of infrastructure as the reason behind slow uptake. But while those factors certainly play a part, the habits of individual consumers is just as large a barrier to overcome.

In the UK currently, 73% of broadband coverage is provided by just four companies: BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk. BT alone occupies 25% of the broadband market. 

Consumers feel safe with those larger telcos. They’re established companies, with years of service and customer reviews behind them. If something does go wrong with the network, they’ve got ranks of customer support to call on and engineers to deploy. 

It’s hard for new, smaller telcos to compete against that. Even if the service they’re offering is thirty times faster, consumers still see switching to a less-established provider as a risk. Will they be able to deliver the promised speeds? If there’s a problem, how long will it take to resolve it? Are new ISPs less likely to stick around? 

But more than that, consumers rarely want to think too much about their broadband provider. Shopping around for new deals is confusing and time consuming. Unless their bill shoots up or there’s something egregiously wrong with their current package, they’re unlikely to browse around at who else is on the market. 

Effective field sales campaigns can be a powerful opportunity for newer ISPs to overcome those challenges. If there’s a perception of risk in switching to a new provider, field sales reps can listen to those concerns and address them directly. And most importantly, they can engage with potential customers about the options available to them. 

Do consumers even know what’s available? 

In 2022, internet service provider Zen found that 32% of UK adults said they couldn’t define what full fibre broadband means. When those that said they knew what full fibre meant were presented with possible definitions, only a third could actually identify the correct one.

When consumers weigh up their broadband options, they’re met with an array of jargon. Both Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) are offered up as fibre broadband, despite FTTC still using slower, less reliable copper wire for part of the connection. Terms like Superfast and Ultrafast broadband are used both as definitions for specific download speeds and marketing terms.

For many consumers, gigabit broadband is just another part of an already unclear picture. If they’re not sure what kind of connection they currently have, the prospect of upgrading it to gigabit is unlikely to have much of an impact.

We recently spoke to a BT customer who signed up to their first Wi-Fi contract in 2022. They explained that while they knew they needed Wi-Fi for their phones and TV, their knowledge about what service they were getting was limited.

“I was paying over £20/month for speeds of less than 3MB,” they said. “It was my daughter who found this out and realised we could actually get a much better full fibre service for a similar price. During initial sign up, no one took the time to explain these options, I could still be paying through the roof for bad internet!'' 

That education gap is a clear opportunity for telcos to reach out more directly to their customers. They have the expertise to decode all of the options and terminology, and it’s expertise that a large section of the market clearly needs to make more informed decisions.

For that to be truly effective however, it needs to go beyond defining things by download speeds. If they’re already uncertain what broadband they currently have, talking about megabits per second likely won’t illuminate much for them. Even if gigabit broadband is far beyond what their current package is capable of, they need to know what that means for their personal internet usage. 

 

Speed won’t matter if consumers don’t believe it 

A 2020 Censuswide survey of UK households served by the big four ISPs found that 22% rated their internet as “OK” or worse. 20% also said they felt they were overcharged for the service they received.

In theory those figures suggest that a large section of the market should be low-hanging fruit for providers offering gigabit speeds. But the problem for new or smaller telcos is that dissatisfaction with their established competitors often reflects poorly on the industry as a whole. 

A common point of distrust for consumers is signing up to a deal that promises fast broadband with speeds up to 500Mb or more per second, only for their average speed to be far lower in reality. When one of the country’s largest providers lets them down like this, it makes them question how a telco they’ve not heard of before can deliver true gigabit internet instead.

With a smaller share of the market, new telcos are also more easily harmed by poor customer experiences. If they say they can provide gigabit broadband but their online reviews say their network is patchy or their engineers didn’t show up to appointments, consumers will question whether they can really deliver on their promise.

Again, this is an opportunity for new ISPs to create a competitive advantage from their field sales. Reps do more than speak to leads and close sales. They’re the bridge between a telco’s brand and its customers, and the relationships they build on their routes will be key to winning trust. 

Building that trust isn’t easy, but it’s what consumers need to get on board with gigabit. 

To learn more about building trust with your customers, read our thoughts on using territory management to boost customer experience and brand reputation and field sales: the untapped competitive advantage. 

by Nathan

Boosting your customer and employee experience using effective territory management

Customer experience and the bottom line are inseparable. According to McKinsey, companies that prioritise positive customer experiences see a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction, a 15% improvement in sales conversion, a 30% lower cost-to-serve and a 30% improvement in employee engagement.

Speaking of which, employee experience is almost equally important to a company’s bottom line. Happy employees are less likely to become quiet quitters or churn with the latest wave in the great resignation. They’re more likely to feel they belong and bring their all, resulting in more positive customer experiences.

There are no instant miracle-grows for employee and customer experience. To address them properly, it often requires major transformation, from product to organisational redesign.

For telcos and utilities that use multichannel strategies, though, there is low hanging fruit to be picked at the first point of contact – and this all comes down to effective territory management.

 

Territory management underpins customer experience

Whether they are approached by a rep or browsing online, customers can need time to make a decision, particularly if it’s one that ties them into a commitment of 12 months. In telcos and utilities in particular, it’s also extremely likely that the potential customer already has what you’re selling, and won't want to be hounded by a sales team to make the switch.

Knowing that a rep is going to call is more likely to result in a better customer experience than a call out of the blue, or worse, a call when the potential customer has made it clear that they won’t be interested in switching for several more months.

Customers have never had more choice than they do now and a negative experience with a brand is something that will stay with them, and may even translate into PR damage through word of mouth and social media.

Conversely, a positive experience created by a rep calling at an agreed upon time, i.e., doing what they said they were going to do, builds customer loyalty and trust in a brand. On one level, it’s a small thing, but these small things are what differentiates one brand from another in a crowded market. And these small moments can only happen if the right tools are in place to ensure communication with potential customers is coordinated carefully.

 

How multichannel sales tech helps

By using a territory management tool from the very start of your scaling journey, you make achieving market penetration far more likely. For Ogi, a new contender in the ISP and managed IT services space, it enabled them to use product and campaign data to deliver great customer experiences at scale.

Alexander Breverton, Ogi’s Telesales Manager, said that without the right solution for the task, “we wouldn’t have had the success we have had, it’s safe to say.”

Great customer experiences are fed by great data. If a rep can find out if a potential customer is happy with their current supplier or products, and record that data, and learn when they may be free to make the decision of staying or moving to a new contract – all this can later make the difference between a smooth sales process and a missed opportunity.

By recording all this with smart multichannel sales software, sales reps will be prompted when to re-establish contact. A second team won’t try to contact the same person too early or through an unpreferred channel, and they won’t start by asking the same questions as before. It’s a simple thing, but valuable to customer relationships.

Effective territory management tools can also be used to plot routes for reps based upon previously recorded customer data, anticipating what customers in certain areas might want or need. This could help create more of a bespoke and targeted approach, saving time for sales teams and potential customers by pitching products more likely to be more relevant to their needs.

 

The quality of territory management affects employees directly

For employees, effective territory management makes their entire experience less frustrating. They get better sales results by wasting less of their time contacting people who don’t want to be contacted.

Also, using the data recorded through initial contact, reps can be provided with warm leads to reach out to, once the potential customers are out of contract. This is more likely to increase conversion rates than knocking on doors of people who may not be interested.

All this equals better sales results. And this in turn leads to better pay and happier reps who are more likely to stay in their role.

Effective territory management can also be used to allocate field sales teams workloads more evenly, based upon their hours, their location and transport situation. Instead of being given an unknown number of doors to knock on in a housing development, they can know their exact routes and how many households they need to visit, which can help to make sales targets more motivating and less daunting.

 

Everyone wins

By using the right territory management tools, you can collate data that goes way beyond customer surveys. Reps can be sent to the right places, at the right times, to pitch the right products. Customers can be contacted at the time they want to be contacted and be provided with information that’s relevant to their needs.

Customer and employee experiences are built upon effective territory management, and when the experience is positive from the first interaction, that’s what your brand will be known for from the very beginning – and this is particularly important if your brand is new to the market.

To learn more, see how our multichannel software helped the new telco brand Ogi to grow or get in touch to schedule a demo.

by Nathan

No more missed opportunities: how lead capture takes your sales results beyond what you're used to

Missing a sales opportunity doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Sometimes a customer needs a bit of breathing room, some time to reflect, or simply to reach the end of a contract before they can make that jump. Nobody wants to be pestered to buy into a new product or service, but perhaps a gentler approach, one that the potential customer can anticipate, is the way forward. 

The question is: how do you achieve that? 

 

How can a lead capture solution help improve your customer experience?  

Certainly, the customer experience is of vital importance, even while they’re only potential customers. According to a study by PwC, 32% of customers will walk away from a brand after a single negative experience, and after several bad experiences, that figure rises to over 50%. Being harassed by sales representatives after having declined an offer is not going to endear the potential customer to change their mind. 

Customer retention is easily as important as customer acquisition, as the initial cost of acquisition is larger than that of retention, and customer churn costs companies vast amounts of revenue. Loyal customers become advocates though, and according to Temkin Group, 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after a single positive experience.  

But is it a big deal? Why focus on missed opportunities? If a potential customer wasn’t ready to commit yet, why not just move on to the next? How would you even capture the missed sales opportunity? 

 

Is multichannel sales the answer? 

It is widely known that missed sales opportunities are a problem, but if sales targets are met, then solving that problem is not high on the list of priorities. When a business is emerging, or moving into a new territory, customer acquisition is essential, but finding customers who aren’t already under contract is a challenge. Making first contact with potential customers when their contracts are nearly up is highly unlikely, so what do you do? 

A multichannel sales solution that captures and stores leads may well be the answer.  

A call to a potential customer could reveal that they may not be 100% happy with their current supplier, but that they still have several months remaining on their contract. The ability to agree a time and date that they would prefer a call back ensures they feel in control and creates a warm lead for the sales team to follow up on. 

Likewise, if the potential customer can choose to be sent a reminder via a channel of their choice, they’re more likely to welcome the communication. A multichannel sales solution joins the dots here – enabling a field sales rep to easily schedule in a phone call or an email instead of another door-to-door call.  

According to PwC, 43% of consumers would pay more for greater convenience and 42% would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience – and by capturing leads with a multichannel sales solution, you can offer both. 

These warm leads could be useful for forecasting future sales and gaining insights to the desirability of your products in the market. Effective territory management from multichannel sales software can also remove these potential customers from lists of sales representatives’ calls, preventing sales representatives from cold calling them prior to the agreed contact date.  

 

One solution across multiple teams 

Without using a joined-up multichannel sales solution, there is little incentive to pass on a warm lead to another team to follow up on. If a sale is made from a follow-up, the representative who made the initial contact often wouldn’t benefit from it at all. But if both teams are working from the same system, you can see when contact was made the first time and allocate the lead accordingly. 

If a warm lead is successfully converted, then the reward and recognition from the sale can be shared between the teams. This creates an incentive to share leads and a greater chance of capturing a sale that may have been lost otherwise.  

We have a compliant solution for just this need. To find out more about our multichannel sales solutions, check out the story behind our tech or learn how it fits together to give you a competitive advantage.  

You can also get in touch to schedule a demo here. 

 

by Nathan

Multichannel sales tech: How it fits together to give you a competitive advantage

In capped industries like utility and telco, you’re often targeting people who are already with a competitor and likely don’t actively switch providers. To stand a chance of winning these customers and their long term loyalty, you need to build trust through flawless customer experiences – that’s where multichannel comes in.

Your customers live in a multichannel society now. The standard is instant, convenient, frictionless onboarding – and anything less than this feels jarring. Customers expect to interact with brands face to face and over the phone and web, without needing to join the dots themselves.

Many utility and telco companies are working with legacy systems. Which means any that can master the complexities of this new multichannel playing field will gain a distinct competitive advantage.

 

What kind of system is needed for multichannel sales?

As McKinsey’s telco report Change the channel: A new multitouch point portfolio outlines, multichannel sales tech is what will set future telco industry winners apart. But it needs buy in from everyone in the business to bring all channels and departments together:

“Delivering a multichannel strategy and enabling cross-channel customer journeys usually requires significant changes in IT platforms,” the authors write.

“Target IT capabilities to be developed include, among many others, a cross-channel product advisory engine, a fully multichannel architecture offering, an agile operations platform supporting real-time automated processing, fully online event-driven CRM, and a fully parametrical product catalog.”

However, a complex system only needs to be complex under the hood. For sales reps it should be effortless – an automated breeze that enables them to whisk people through a tailored customer journey and close deals almost instantly anywhere, anytime.

Off-the-shelf options that try to achieve this are rarely a good fit for telco and utility companies. They’re designed for different customer journeys and fewer processes, so they create additional friction for sales teams and anyone trying to manage the back end.

To make cross-channel integration work behind the scenes, and to make it work effectively for customer journeys in utility and telco, often requires many tailored APIs. Zoom in on the multichannel architecture and it’s clear that this can’t be the work of just any developer.

 

Multichannel architecture: how it should fit together

When we configured our multichannel sales tech for Ogi, an ISP and managed IT services company, the engagement was as important as the delivery.

We worked with Ogi to shape a customer journey for field, tele and web sales, and we identified what APIs we would need to pull in and push out the relevant data.

While some systems might make use of only four calls, more sophisticated systems like Ogi’s can make use of up to 12 API calls. These can include requests, such as for product, address data and so on. They can also involve many outbound calls, sending information for payment verification, to book installations, to 3rd party systems and other sales processes.

All this makes the tech simple but specialised on the surface, enabling Ogi’s reps to make contact with potential customers and close deals in record time – without stalling points in the process – on the phone or in the field.

Beneath the surface, the cross-channel integration makes it possible to analyse sales performance metrics in a new way across field, tele and web sales. Ogi can see where they can retarget prospects that don’t complete the sales cycle, or where customer journeys needed to be tweaked further.

 

What’s an affordable route?

 As a new contender in fibre, the Ogi team says they struggled to compete on price against other providers, so they needed to offer a great customer service as a USP.

“The sales processes we had in the business before PSI were not fit for purpose,” says Sally-Anne Skinner, Chief Revenue Officer at Ogi. “We would not have been able to go out to market and deliver the scale that we have and the penetration that we have without significant amounts of customer dissatisfaction and pain and resources.”

An out-of-the-box solution wouldn’t integrate field, tele and web sales in the way they needed. But sophisticated solutions are usually built gradually over many years, often from the ground up. Ogi couldn’t afford to wait.

They needed a seamless multichannel experience. Although customers would never think of it in these terms, in a multichannel world, they are coming to expect tailored customer journeys, unified by an automated backend system.

Using our full suite of products – Fusion Core, Pulse, and Touchstone – Ogi were able to create this seamless end-to-end sales journey across the three sales channels that they operate in. It was a world away from their former solution.

“If we were still using that solution,” says Alexander Breverton, Telesales Manager at Ogi, “we wouldn’t have had the success we have had, it’s safe to say,”

To learn more, see our case study deep dive into how PSI helped Ogi scale and penetrate their market

by Nathan

Complaints: Moving from reactive to proactive engagement

Customer complaints are a fact of life for most companies.

From the humblest small business to the largest utility providers, there are bound to be at least a few unhappy customers from time to time. While some challenges are small and easily resolved, large numbers of complaints might serve as a warning sign that something is going wrong with your customer journey.

In a competitive market retaining customers is key according to Bain & Company, "a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit", they also say “a customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service-related than price- or product-related”. It's key therefore to get a handle on customer challenges as early as possible

Here are 3 suggestions that you might find helpful in getting ahead of any risk:

  • Understand the root causes of customer challenges
  • Prioritise clear and effective communications with customers
  • Consistent and impactful training for your sales agents

 

#1: Understanding the root cause of customer challenges

The days of one-way communication are over, customers want to engage in meaningful dialogue, especially when something goes wrong. However, waiting until something goes wrong can often be too late.

Creating regular opportunities to seek feedback from your customers on their experience will enable your business to take action.

From surveys to complaint forms, the single most important step in remediating customer challenges is to identify the causes and to understand whether they are one-off issues affecting this customer alone or a recurring issue in your process that warrants further investigation.

This process will also give you insight into what you are doing well, ideas for improvements over time and potentially additional revenue opportunities. Why wait until it's an issue? Let's make space to talk to our customers.

#2: Prioritise clear and effective communications with customers

For many people change is difficult in general, that remains true when it comes to switching to a new energy supplier, changing your phone contract, or understanding price increase notices. It is why there are so many people in the UK that are on the standard variable tariff, the most expensive one.

When choosing a new supplier, for example, there can be an overwhelming amount of information to process, and if this information is unclear or open to interpretation it can cause more stress and anguish on a customer. This in turn could lead to complaints or the customer switching provider.

Utility companies can benefit immensely from simply focusing on making the communication of their services, billing structure clear-cut and easy to understand. By keeping communications between your company and the customer simple and easy, your customers will be able to digest the information and understand what they are agreeing to at each stage of your process.

#3: Consistent and Impactful training for your salespeople

Any employee who interacts with your customer is acting on your business's behalf. We have all seen the impact of rogue rep behaviour on other businesses and the utility industry as a whole. This doesn't need to happen in your business though, creating the right processes and the right environment will enable you to mitigate the risk. One of the most important ways you can deliver for your potential customers is by creating consistent and impactful training for your salespeople.

From communication your brand value and what's important (is sales the only thing that matters or is the customer experience, data quality or market intelligence as important?), to specific training relating to interacting with priority or vulnerable people, your sales tactics - solid training is at the heart of your success.

 

How you deliver that training can impact how well that knowledge is retained and applied.

There have been numerous research efforts to chart the speed at which newly learned skills and information gained during a training session are retained or lost. Sometimes called the “forgetting curve,” the loss of ability to recall new information over time after a training session is almost inevitable. While the amount of information lost to an individual may vary based on a breathtaking number of factors, statistics cited by specialist organisations such as Festo-Didactic state that as much as 77% of information from a single training session is lost after just six days.

So, is training pointless? No, but it does need to be done right in order to ensure the retention of information. The problem with many training programmes is that they consist of a single seminar where the employees are trying to retain every piece of information that they need at once, typically without any chance to practice the knowledge gained. The result is that each employee tends to remember a few tidbits of information from the training session that they found poignant and little else.

One way that your company can improve the retention of information from a training session is to have a digital learning solution in place on the agent’s device, with regular just-in-time learning before application, and regular assessments to ensure they are 'fit to sell'. This provides employees with the chance to review smaller, more digestible chunks of information and test their knowledge on specific portions of the training. By offering continuous learning opportunities within their workflow, you can significantly improve how well employees remember their training.

Effective training can be the single most important way in which your company prevents customer complaints, as trained, knowledgeable sales staff are much less likely to miscommunicate services and frustrate customers.

 

How happy are you with your customer engagements in the sales process and beyond?

If you think there is room for improvement we would love to hear from you.

by Nathan

Effective territory management is more than basic geography

Historically sales territories have existed as a way to simplify the division of accounts between your sales team. Geographic boundaries and sales team availability is used to establish which accounts belong to which account manager. It is then down to the territory manager to service the accounts and leads in their patch.

The problem with traditional territory management is that it treats all customers (and leads) equally. Your field sales reps will typically plan their weekly/monthly/annual visits, cycling through customers site visits in the same way indefinitely. Every contact is afforded roughly the same level of facetime.

In an ideal world, this equality would be fine. But the truth is that some clients spend more than others, making them worth more to your business. It is these clients that should be receiving greater attention from your sales reps.

 

Redefining your territories

Taking your sales strategy forward, it may help to stop thinking of territories in terms of physical geography. Instead, you can create territories around various different factors including:

  • Product range or tariff
  • Account type
  • Local competition
  • Personas – the type of people being targeted in your field sales campaigns

Even this basic change of definition opens new sales opportunities. You are now able to reallocate leads and accounts to sales reps in new, more effective ways:

  • Product experts can manage specific accounts based on the utility service they use.
    • You can split the sales team between corporate and consumer accounts, allowing reps to specialise in one or the other.
  • You can reallocate additional field sales reps to target regions where your competition is particularly strong or weak.
  • Your sales team can tailor their strategy and pitches according to an allocated persona.

 

Targeting customers

From a business account perspective, you may already have divided your territory based on account value – after all, those clients who spend more warrant more of your resources and time. But the truth is that some accounts will have a secondary value which is sometimes quite significant.

In the age of social business, you may find that some of your low-value accounts are actually very good at referring their own contacts. So the value of their contract may be low, but the referral business they bring in more than compensates.

This realisation is another important motivator for changing territories and account allocation. These clients will need similar nurturing and encouragement as you would provide your highest-value accounts. Losing these high secondary value clients could have a serious effect on your sales.

This is still relevant in a domestic/retail setting where the size of accounts can still be a factor, especially considering the age of smart where increasing devices further embed your products through your customer’s homes. In the majority of accounts though you are playing for the longevity of the relationship, who is more likely to stay with you and why. Do you understand why they are signing up with you? Is it price alone or price and service, and how do you continue to add value in the long term to keep them a customer? Capturing and acting on relevant data can help give you an edge over your competitors.

 

Get flexible

Changing the way you define and manage territories is not a one-off task, however. Your customers’ needs and preferences will change frequently, as will market conditions. And where territories are defined by any factor other than geography, they too will need to be updated to reflect the changes.

In the data-driven sales environment, this is more complicated than changing a few lines on a map. The factors used to segment advanced territories are not so immediately obvious.

The sales operations manager needs a sales platform that allows them to manage every aspect of their sales strategy and supporting data quickly and efficiently. This flexibility allows you to change strategy whenever required to maximise conversions and sales.

 

The value in your database

No matter the channel, feeding the sales engine is a constant battle for sales leaders, do you have enough quality leads, how can you improve your conversion rate, are there more opportunities for improvement? With the complexity of multiple channels, customer and product types sitting alongside multiple systems and processes there is the potential to leave opportunities on the table.

It’s therefore key to have a strategy and a digital sales solution that will enable you to capture and centralise pertinent sales data including; leads from any channel, intelligence about product performance per channel and area, alongside other data that is relevant you your business e.g. do people in the southwest sign up more often when the weather is rainy.

When you have insight that can be actioned, you can utilise more value from your database, leads can be nurtured until ready and delivered to the relevant channel at the appropriate time, improvements can be made your sales processes if you understand where people get stuck, you can resource your territory appropriately based on performance, and monitor the results in real-time through your sales dashboards. Each door knock will in turn deliver more value if managed correctly.

 

Digital Sales Solution

PSI has been delivering tailored solutions to energy and telecommunications providers since 2004. Our robust Fusion platform can manage the full matrix of your sales engine, from how you sell, e.g.; field sales, telesales, web sales, channel partners, 3rd party sales, to what you sell and to who. We make it easy for your customers to switch, for your team to deliver, and for your business to gain intelligence and maximise sales.

If you want to see the solution in action, schedule a 30 min Demo with our specialists.

by Nathan

How Gaining Insights from Your Data Can Help You Win More Deals

We’ve all heard the saying “data is the new oil”, but what may not be as well known is the concept behind it. Like crude oil, raw data isn’t valuable in itself. To unlock the actionable insights it contains, the data must first be accurately gathered, combined with other relevant data, and analysed. When properly done, it can bridge the gap between how you think your business is running and how it’s really running.

Doing this requires embedding the actionable insights acquired from your data into your business strategies for more proactive and intentional decision making. Energy and telco companies that recognise the importance of the data they capture and act upon it will be in an enviable position to improve the way business is conducted, and ultimately win more deals.

 

When Intelligent Data Isn’t Part of the Sales Journey

Data can provide a bounty of intelligence when it comes to understanding where you’re excelling and where improvements need to be made to increase sales closure rates. Let’s explore two sales scenarios – door-to-door field sales and online sales – looking at each through the lens of when data isn’t integrated into your processes.

 

Door-to-door field sales: Given closing the deal is the primary goal of your field reps, do you know if money is being left on the table? For example, we’ll assume that during the course of a day, a field rep knocked on 10 doors and made 1 sale. Although the good news is that a sale was made, what do you know about the 9 prospects that declined to switch providers? Do you have the insights to know

  • Why the 9 prospects didn’t make a purchase?
  • If any of the 9 prospects are short- or long-term actionable leads?
  • If any business intelligence was captured from the 9 prospects?
  • If one or more of the 9 prospects were previous customers and switched to a competitor? And if so…
  • Do you know which competitor they switched to?
  • Do you know why they switched such as to take advantage of a product you don’t offer, the competition offered lower rates, or provided better service?

 

Online sales: Are you killing the competition when it comes to online sales? If not, do you know why? Let’s face it, when customers make purchases online, they’re pretty much left to their own devices throughout the sales journey. If virtually every customer that visited your website completed a sign-up form, your sales figures would be on the rise. Since that’s not a realistic expectation, the question you need to ask yourself is – why are prospects dropping out of the sign-up process?

While both of these scenarios highlight the need to integrate intelligent data into your sales processes, data can also give you the insights to better understand your field sales reps performance and where improvements are needed.

 

Using Data to Shed Light on Sales Performance

The 80/20 Rule, also referred to as the Pareto Principle, states that 80% of sales are made by 20% of your sales reps. And that’s not all, a recent McKinsey & Company article discusses the performance gap between sales reps, saying that regardless of the metric used, the top 30% of your sales reps will outperform the bottom 30% by as much as a factor of 4. In an industry with high turnover, closing the skills gap sounds insurmountable, doesn’t it? Not necessarily.

The first step is to gain an understanding of what makes your best reps so good. This is where the data you collect can help. By introducing field sales rep and customer surveys, as well as technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), you’ll be able to acquire the behavioural data of your best sales reps to determine patterns in successful deals closures. These insights can then be used to refine your sales strategies by embedding digital training, coaching and field rep assessments into your workflows.

Your goal should be to introduce small incremental improvements, rather than a single sweeping change that could have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. Use the insights you gathered and a phased approach across all customer-facing parts of your company. When combined, the marginal improvements implemented will – over time – have a big impact on your organisation.

 

Put Your Data to Work for You

Are you arming your field sales reps with the data they need to win business? PSI Touchstone enables you to gather data and seamlessly integrate it into your sales stack. Drawing from multiple sources we help you capture and validate the data you need to close sales performance gaps and win more deals.

Our energy and telco clients gain the analytics and insights to see where prospects fall out of the sales cycle, retarget prospects that didn’t complete the sale cycle, and analyse sales performance metrics. Remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Don’t let another day go by without having the data intelligence you need. Contact us to schedule a 20-minute call with one of our data specialists.

by Nathan

More power to your sales teams - improving energy customer experience

How do you set about improving customer engagement when switching providers is super easy, and brand loyalty is flailing in the quest to find a better deal?

Changing consumer habits and increased competition have left utilities battling to keep customers happy, which in many cases has contributed to falling customer retention.

In this article, we’ll outline how a software-led approach to improving your customer’s experience at every interaction has the potential to help retain customers.

 

Differentiating commodities through choice

Utilities are  perceived as basic commodities. Some commentators put worsening customer engagement down to changes in consumer perception and purchasing habits. While price is an obvious focus for some, others are concerned about how the environmental impact of non-renewables is being tackled, or how the company will fair from a customer service or complaints perspective when things go wrong. Given how similar utility provision is from one supplier to the next, the customer can pick the most appealing provider on enhance grounds of choice.

 

Quality customer interactions and service

While energy providers may not have much room to self-differentiate on product offerings, how they manage the customer experience at every interaction is something that can set them apart.

As 2021 energy satisfaction survey from Which reveals, challenges are still present for the largest energy providers in customer service and complaints handling, knocking 28% off the score from the highest ranking (Outfox the Market), to the lowest ranking (Npower). When taking in additional factors including how quickly they respond to customers, how quickly they resolve complaints and others, that pushed Octopus and Pure Planet into the top two spots.

Clearly, customer interactions provide a rare chance for energy providers to set themselves apart. It is an area where the largest energy providers have an opportunity to reimagine and win back their customers.

 

Easier sharing of customer information

A long-standing problem with customer interactions has been the lack of pertinent information at sales/customer service agents’ disposal. With multiple communication channels involved, and almost certainly multiple team members too, keeping track of the moments that matter to customers has been an insurmountable task.

According to an Accenture report ‘Customer-centricity: Must-Have or a Waste of Energy?’, communication time between utility suppliers and customers averages out at a mere 10 minutes per year. If your support agent in the field or your sales agent at the call centre does not have up-to-date information on the company’s relationship with the customer, they’re likely to spend much of that crucial contact time repeating steps and frustrating the customer.

This information deficit creates essentially transactional relationships that discourage brand loyalty.  The providers who are excelling at this have the advantage of being digital-first, being about to create or procure systems and tools to create great end to end customer experiences that delivers what the customer expects at every stage of their journey, in a simple and intuitive way, and has the information readily available to solve their problems when they arise.

By leveraging better-informed communications to facilitate better-engaged customer relationships, you can build trust and positive impressions. This can be achieved using software that pulls customer information and interactions into a central, digital location, which can be accessed by the team members who need it in the moment.

Not only can this approach enhance B2C communications, but it can also support cross-departmental communication to solve customer cases. With this approach, we no longer have a fragmented team coaxing the same information out of the customer again and again. Instead, we have a well-integrated team that has consistently listened and logged any customer details which could have longer-term relevance.

 

Omnichannel and a single customer view (SCV)

Now we’ve touched on how software can help improve B2C communications (and therefore customer engagement), let’s get to grips with the central concepts behind the required technology.

Above all, using software to improve communications to energy customers will rely upon the capability to create a single customer view (SCV), by bringing together every channel of communication – including telephone, email and SMS – into a single system. This allows the sales agent who is responding to a customer’s query to look back through their interaction history and learn more about the case, for example.

Alongside communication logs, the SCV might also include account details including live data from the customer’s smart meter, which may cut the time it takes to handle customer problems.

For larger energy companies this has historically been a challenge with disconnected systems and processes meaning data can be siloed in different departments. With stretched internal technical resources this can take years to resolve, however you can utilise tools and platforms from partners to extend the business capabilities and hone the right experience for your customers, while this is being mapped and built in the background.

 

How rich customer interaction data can help de-escalate complaints

The thing about omnichannel customer interactions in a single channel view is that providers stand to get more out of it over time, thanks to the gradual accrual of actionable customer data.

For example, some energy providers can predict when a customer will next make a complaint, by looking at their previous interactions and challenges certain time period. Such insights make it possible to proactively intervene sensitively in customer interactions, effectively defusing them before they escalate to a more serious level.

If you are reviewing how you can better deliver for your customers and would like to discuss how we are enabling the transformation of customer experience for our customers, schedule a 20 minute call with our team now.

by Nathan

Getting Utility Sales Right the First Time

Getting sales agreements right the first time is a huge concern for any sales team. For utility companies, making sure that every “i” is dotted and that every “t” is crossed in accordance with local regulations regarding energy sales is especially important.

For the first time in over a decade, the largest energy providers in the UK are re-entering the market through face to face selling channels. While these providers are taking their first cautious steps back into this world, other more experienced players are also planning to re-enter the field sales domain following the halt caused by the pandemic.

For both types of providers, ensuring that the people representing you in the field are not only complying but delivering an exceptional experience is key to not only avoiding any complaints or challenges but also to win over new customers and capitalise on the very real and lucrative opportunities available.

With this in mind, here are some considerations for your business leaders:

Field sales historically has had a high churn rate, in some markets field sales reps will often migrate to the energy provider offering the cheapest product to the market. As many field sales reps are paid on commission only structures, they go where they are most likely to be successful and in turn, get paid. While price is hugely important, the level of service offered by an organisation is also key, especially considering the number of cheaper, smaller energy providers going bust in recent years due to their mismanagement of customer needs.

Training:

When you are putting a sales rep in front of a customer, they need to not only have detailed knowledge of your products and services but also of the value you offer customers that include and go beyond prices, such as service and overall customer experience. This puts a higher demand on the sales reps to develop their soft skills. Developing these skills and creating the type of customer experience that delivers at every interaction takes time and consideration.

Creating a training plan that not only offers upfront training and onboarding, but also offers continuous learning, just-in-time learning and assessment and can be delivered to the rep on their device just before and after they start selling, makes the information easily digestible, keeps the material fresh in their mind, and allows sales reps to apply their learning immediately with the results tracked.

Quality Assurance:

Inaccurate sales numbers cause headaches for both sales reps and business leaders, especially if there are improvements that can be made to your process to shore up those challenges. If there are challenges with a sale, such as incomplete or inaccurate information, or you are an organisation that does a separate follow-up to every customer post-sale, all of this equals more time and more cost, more time to rework or validate a sale and more cost both direct and opportunity costs.

To mitigate this costly consequence your organisation can implement a digital sales solution with the ability to highlight the gaps in your sales process - and add checks, validations and automated workflows to your sales process. This takes the guesswork out of selling, giving the sales reps a more accurate view of their sales commission and providing you with more accurate data to make decisions and improve your process overall.

To complement this from a quality assurance perspective, your customer can review and sign off on the sale on their device, confirming the legitimacy of the sale. You can automatically follow up with a customer satisfaction survey to ensure the rep has completed their duties as expected.

If you are embarking on a new or emboldened sales effort we’d love to hear what approaches you are taking to getting it right, the first time.

Schedule a sales MOT with the team today

by Nathan

Turn Unexceptional Customer Service Into Exceptional Customer Experiences

Customer expectations are constantly changing and many companies are struggling to keep pace with the evolving needs of consumers. Although some industries do better than others at delivering great customer experiences, in general, there’s room for improvement across the board.

Customer experience (CX) affects all industries, however, energy and telco companies are in a unique situation as they interact with their customers on a daily basis, which puts additional pressure on them to achieve customer experience goals. A recent Accenture Research Report adds to this by saying, ... an experience renaissance is afoot ˗ one that is galvanising companies to push beyond the CX philosophy and organise the whole business around the delivery of exceptional experiences. With an increasing number of organisations developing innovative solutions to exceed customer expectations, energy and telco companies need to step up their game and foster customer-centricity across the entire organisation.

 

Poor Customer Experiences: Triggers and Outcomes 

What constitutes a customer experience, whether good, bad, or mediocre? Whilst there’s not a single answer, the one thing that you can be certain of is that customers now have higher expectations than ever before.

When it comes to customer expectations and experiences, statistics are plentiful. To help bring to light the pivotal role customer experience has on your business, we’ve gathered key statistics to help illustrate expectations from the viewpoint of consumers.

The results of delivering poor customer experiences can’t be underestimated. Not only can it result in churn and diminished profitability, but regulatory fines are a real possibility, as well as the potential to harm your brand.

Now that we have a better understanding of the potential outcomes when customers are provided a poor experience, let’s take a deep dive into some of the causes. A recent study conducted by PagerDuty and Dimensional Research determined the following as the 7 key barriers to providing a great customer experience.

 

  1. Increasingly complex IT environments - 64%
  2. Increasing customer expectations around convenience and performance - 44%
  3. Hiring and retaining talent with the right skills - 40%
  4. Difficulty prioritising issues - 35%
  5. Inability to innovate quickly - 33%
  6. Siloes and bottlenecks between internal teams - 26%
  7. Increasing competitive pressures - 25%

 

In addition to the above, many energy and telco organisations are grappling with disconnected systems, complicated internal processes, cumbersome compliance processes, and an inability to keep the customer at the centre of the journey. With a number of potential issues hindering your ability to deliver exceptional customer service, you may wonder what the experience looks like through the eyes of your customers.

Let’s imagine for a minute that you are grappling with disconnected systems, complicated processes, and technology and tools that don't provide the information field reps require when they need it. While this is day-to-day life for you and your business, your customers see something else. It’s important to remember that customers don’t have a looking glass to the inner workings of your organisation ˗ they only see the aftermath of this situation which may include:

  • Repeatedly being asked for data and content that you already possess.
  • An endless stream of transfers where they need to repeat information previously provided.
  • Processes that are confusing and overwhelming, resulting in stopping the transaction.
  • Apologies from field service reps and customer service reps for the way they have to handle the transaction.
  • The inability of your salespeople to effectively provide customer guidance.

When bad experiences happen, how does your organisation handle customer complaints? If you're like 44% of UK businesses, you’re still relying on manual processes such as spreadsheets that don’t provide the swiftness needed to react promptly. With more than half of the people around the globe believing that companies need to take action on feedback provided by customers, it’s time for energy and telco providers to transform the experiences they are providing to customers.

 

Transforming the Customer Experience

When consumers were asked what impacts their level of trust with a company, offering excellent customer service is ranked number one. And around the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

What does it take to deliver the exceptional experiences customers demand? Customers don’t want the hassle of trying to figure out what needs to be done and how. Nor do they want or have the time to go through disparate processes and workflows. Customers want interactions that are easy to understand, easy to use and instructions that are simple to follow. Giving customers the experiences they crave requires automation, seamless integration, natural workflows, and data that is richly populated.

To begin the process of turning unexceptional customer service into exceptional customer experiences, there are some steps that you can take immediately. Based on our extensive experience, we recommend that you:

  • Implement customer journey mapping into your customer service processes. The mapping should include each point where your potential customer interacts with your business, e.g. signing up, address changes, billing, complaints, service, etc. Once the mapping is complete, be sure to review it for interaction flows, expected customer experiences, and how the customer will be able to engage in two-way communication with your business.
  • Populate rich data into processes for customer or prospect engagements, such as information provided to the field or telesales rep that pertains to the interaction and display known information on the application form.
  • Develop intuitive and natural workflows.
  • Make initial field sales rep training and ongoing courses a mandatory requirement and easy to digest and apply to the work they are doing

Providing exceptional customer experiences isn’t a one-and-done initiative, it’s a journey that you’ll continually revisit as customer expectations continue to develop. One thing is certain, providing customers with traditional experiences is no longer enough.

When it comes to your ability to compete, the customer experience is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor. According to Gartner, 89% of businesses expect to compete mainly on customer experience and organisations that take customer experience seriously will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers.

 

Improving the Customer Experience Starts with a Single Step

As the Chinese proverb so articulately states, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” the journey to delivering exceptional customer experiences also begins with a single step.

As the leading provider of sales technology for energy and telco providers, we have an intimate understanding of what it takes to move the customer experience needle in these industries. Whether that's getting started with a minimum viable product (MVP) in order to plug the most critical sales gaps or longer-term plans to create an end-to-end exceptional customer experience strategy, with us helping them every step of the way.

Our ability to put you on the path to delivering exceptional customer experiences doesn’t end there. Are you saddled with legacy systems that are resulting in disconnected systems, processes, and people? Replacing these systems can be cost-prohibitive. With PSI, you don’t need to. We're able to push and pull data from multiple systems ˗ both old and new ˗ which provides you with the automation and workflows you need to improve the customer experience.

 

What are your customer experience goals? Regardless of where you are on your journey, we’re here to help. Contact us today to book a 30-minute strategy session to learn how we can help bridge your customer experience gaps.

by Nathan